I dunno why any Twitter engineers would be really trying that hard right now.
Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.
Comments like this makes me lose faith i humanity.
If I were a engineer at Twitter, I'd do my absolute best up to the minute I have to leave the premises. Because I would care about the company, my colleagues and most importantly for the >200m people who use Twitter for fun, educational, business and those who depend on it.
But it's probably because I'm an old beard, who value being honest and ethical, to be the better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates.
> If I were a engineer at Twitter, I'd do my absolute best up to the minute I have to leave the premises. Because I would care about the company, my colleagues and most importantly for the >200m people who use Twitter for fun, educational, business and those who depend on it.
I'm an old beard too and this seems (sorry) borderline delusional to me. Even in normal circumstances that kind of devotion to an employer never pays off - financially or emotionally. Companies the size of Twitter do not "care" and the product certainly doesn't. Caring back just sets you up for an inevitable, brusing collision with reality.
In twitter's present situation, and given the well-known personality traits of its new owner, I'd argue that exit planning is the only sane thing for an employee to be doing with their time right now.
I don't think TheChaplain is saying you should be devoted to your employer, but rather to respect your work, your colleagues, your customers, and your company. That is not even incompatible with planning an exit. The best people I've worked with put in an effort to the end, even when they are on the way out, because they are professionals.
I was commenting on @TheChaplain saying they'd do their "absolute best up to the minute I have to leave" and offering an opinion asymetric loyalty in tech businesses. Thats all I was commenting on. I think thats pretty clear.
What is the point of this self-imposed honor when the person at the top is more than happy to play you as the fool?
Musk certainly didn’t act with much honesty or ethics in this deal, do you think he’s done an abrupt about face to suddenly be upstanding? And knowing that, being willingly taken advantage of only enables this poor behavior.
I can see your point if it was some kind of critical infrastructure like a hospital, but for Twitter I personally really couldn't care less.
Blind devotion to your employer or country is not a virtue, but a naive idealism. Honor is just a general heuristic for doing good, it's not the good itself. Doing good is done on a case by case basis, ideals are just a guide. We have to evaluate all our actions with an ethical criticality.
"I'm just doing my job" is a classic deflection of responsibility. If you do not believe your job is ethical or moral or compatible with your beliefs, then to continue to do it is indeed blind devotion. Just because you are paid to do it has nothing to do with what's right.
Is it honorable to die on your sword for a casino or a big pharma price gouging department? Or an adtech company?
Twitter employees are rightfully questioning their career choices right now, and if their continued help will give Twitter a chance of making the world a better place under current leadership objectives.
> When winds start blowing the other way, that’s when one’s true character is tested.
But that depends on who you feel you are working for. If King Charming is replaced by Gorr the Butcher, you may need to decide whether you are truly loyal to the king or the people. Butchering the people that the previous king saved would not strike me as honorable, even if you sworn loyalty to "the crown".
I'm not saying Musk will be bad, I truly have no idea. But if he decided (say) that fake news are good for engagement, it would be indeed wise to question whether loyalty to Twitter Inc. is a good idea. Recognizing when things have changed for the worse is a sign of maturity and not a failure of character.
Values are multiple. You have to consider professional responsibility and weigh it against responsibility to yourself and your family as well, and most people would place those above all others.
This change is not "minor". Twitter employees have just had massive risk and uncertainty added to their short term career. There was some risk and uncertainty prior, because the company would probably have been doing layoffs, but a clearly impulsive, mercurial, uncaring and overstretched person is now in charge of decisions that affect all employees income, health insurance, etc.)
You also have to consider your political values and alignment with the company's goals. I think a lot of people at Twitter also believe in the value of the "public square" which Musk purports to care about. But if you look at Musk's always hyper deferential statements in China, or one of his large investors now being the Saudi government, or his "solution" to the war in Ukraine, it seems that he has a much more favorable outlook on authoritarianism than the previous leadership. Twitter's not about to be a voice for the powerless but a megaphone for the rich and powerful. That has to weigh in on one's thinking about work.
If I strongly disagree with the new CEO's opinion or company values, I can move on.
None of these things you mention would suddenly make me:
- receive joy from other people's misfortunes
- make others lose money on purpose
- sabotage and attempt to destroy a company
For me, someone who does these things (that OP originally mentioned), is someone very far away from being ethical.
Hence my original point, if you think it's ok to go behind behind people's back because suddenly there's a new CEO at some company, you were never honorable.
What you really have done is just made yourself an excuse to act who you truly are. Someone who'd say everything's ok and fake a smile in front of your colleagues while lurking behind the backs destroy people’s work.
I very much dislike this loud, ego-centric, self-righteous "I know better" political individualism, where a person thinks it's suddenly OK to "have fun and destroy".
"I very much dislike this loud, ego-centric, self-righteous "I know better" political individualism, where a person thinks it's suddenly OK to "have fun and destroy"."
So why would you work really super-duper hard for Mr. Musk while he waits to finish the code review to fire you??
That's, IMO, an absurd contradiction. If you value honesty and ethics, you don't work at twitter. It's detrimental to mental health and society, possibly more so than facebook, just for the money.
And now Musk might try to use it for his own political and financial agenda. If that risk is serious, running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
> And now Musk might try to use it for his own political and financial agenda. If that risk is serious, running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
I try not to flame here, but that viewpoint may actually be insane.
It's a job. You're not changing the world. If you don't like the politics of the CEO, leave.
You're not a freedom fighter. Real people in the world are actually fighting for their lives, their freedoms and the right to eat and live in dignity. Literally hundreds of millions. None of those people are based in Silicon Valley.
> ... running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
Is this what you said during your hypothetical interview with Twitter? If yes, be my guest. If not, you should abide by the promises you made to your employers.
It's got nothing to do with "self-imposed honor code" or whatever terms people come up with to belittle people with integrity. You made a promise when you accepted that offer. You either stand by that or quit.
It's not the navy. You're not under orders. They can fire you if they want. But if that's not enough for you: promises and loyalty works boths ways. Suppose you're a veteran at twitter. The company (you thought) joined is not what it is today. You're not bound to any original promises.
Furthermore, you didn't make any promises. You signed a contract, which is only partly binding (check your jurisdiction for details; e.g., where I live, a non-compete clause is frequently overruled by a judge). You didn't promise to increase shareholder value on your mother's life.
Finally, when the interests are substantial enough, ethics trump loyalty and honor. I don't think I have to substantiate that.
Of course, this doesn't hold when you adhere to some kind of "corporatism", where the state and/or corporations decide what's good for you.
I don't think we disagree. You don't like the company you work for? You Quit. You think it's not the company you joined some time ago? You Quit. I can go on and on like this. You didn't promise to increase shareholder value, but you did promise you would try in good faith.
None of this justifies willfully harming your employer.
Edit: One of the things that is an exception I believe is whistle blowing. You may expose stuff you deem unacceptable or harmful to the general public. But I guess that's about it. Of course this all depends on your jurisdiction.
You joined Tesla to build cars of the future and bring self driving to the masses and then they ask you to review some other companys codebase, so that the boss can fire bunch of people.
Yay, I will do my absolute best.
Curious about this as well. I could understand being a little peeved as a shareholder if this is purely coming out of Tesla's pockets, but I realize a lot of people have bought into Tesla and think of Elon Musk's distractions as part of the bad that comes with the good.
This is a laudable position. But consider that, depending on your level and immediate boss, you might not be in a position to survive the layoffs no matter how personally productive and impactful you are.
There will be a lot of snap judgements made by Musks engineers on who is to be spared and there are two major terms. One is how engaged and interested your current boss is at staying, and the other is what Musk’s technical staff think. Their judgements will be quick and driven by outcomes like broad attrition targets and what is absolutely necessary.
If your on an unnecessary team, but are a rockstar, you might not survive if nobody communicates your value. And it is very likely that entire divisions are on the chopping block. Without an ally on a surviving division that says “I need this guy moved to my team yesterday” it’s unlikely to happen.
Not saying you shouldn’t do the right thing, but try to understand the interests of and see what makes sense for you.
The site has been flooded with 4chan users saying the n-word, and there are no attempts to stop this. This is the new Twitter. This means it’s trashed. It’s like trying to save a piece of raw meat left out in the sun. Why put a single shred of effort into this?
> who value being honest and ethical, to be the better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates
I am the first to poop on corporates and their power games but i agree with you on this. Honesty and ethics are not something you simply throw out the window just because.
> Comments like this makes me lose faith i humanity.
> If I were a engineer at Twitter, I'd do my absolute best up to the minute I have to leave the premises. Because I would care about the company, my colleagues and most importantly for the >200m people who use Twitter for fun, educational, business and those who depend on it.
> But it's probably because I'm an old beard, who value being honest and ethical, to be the better person even if I'm in a room of degenerates.
To be blunt: you're making yourself sound like a sucker who will let people exploit you.
Spend as much energy doing right by your employer as they will spend doing right by you.
> To be blunt: you're making yourself sound like a sucker who will let people exploit you.
That's not really what it sounds like at all to me. A more apt analogy might be OP wanting to help all the passengers off the sinking ship before jumping off themselves. While you could just abandon the ship and assume everyone else knows how to get off without assistance, reality shows that many people still need that helping hand.
I don't think OP is letting anyone exploit them. OP just wants to help people, which I think is quite admirable.
> A more apt analogy might be OP wanting to help all the passengers off the sinking ship before jumping off themselves.
That's not an apt analogy. No one's going to die or even be harmed if Twitter crashes and burns tomorrow. Twitter is a frivolous discretionary product that exists only for its owners' profit, nothing more.
> OP just wants to help people, which I think is quite admirable.
Yes, but it's also not a good thing to be tricked into thinking you're helping people, when you're really being exploited.
If you're going to keep working on a sinking ship, you better have a pretty good reason to think you're actually helping people that doesn't amount to a regurgitation of a corporate mission statement or a foolish one-sided loyalty to an unloyal organization.
Ok that's fair, I don't think anyone is going to die. But calling Twitter a "frivolous discretionary product" feels very dismissive of the real impact that it has on society. For instance: the Capitol Insurrection
To be entirely honest, I have no idea what Elon Musk's management will bring to Twitter--whether it'll get better or worse, and what might happen as a result. I don't personally think anything will crash and burn, but that's not to say that the transition won't be rocky and influence _some_ people at least.
Elon Musk wants to make verified statuses purchasable. Would fake news outlets abuse this to further spread misinformation? I don't know, but I do hope that there is someone in the company who will consider these issues more deeply than I have the time for.
So no, I don't think anyone is a sucker for acting in the best interest of their customers and colleagues. Yes, the new executives might not value their employees the same way anymore, but I don't believe it's right to abandon those you care about in the face of a new enemy. OP sounds to me more like they're loyal to the users, rather than to the organization.
> Yes, but it's also not a good thing to be tricked into thinking you're helping people, when you're really being exploited.
Why can't it be both? For you, you probably think that "avoiding being exploited by your employer" is more important than helping people (eg. your users). Which is probably fine if people just left it at that.
In a sense it becomes an ethical problem with the general sentiment that hurting Elon Musk as much as possible is more important than not harming your users, to the extent that some people call out on people who don't subscribe to those views.
Personally, IMHO, if one doesn't like a company they can quit. I don't see how people can claim moral high ground by advocating staying onboard for the purpose of sabotaging the company.
I think being "honest and ethical" is at its heart a useful strategy for organizing the collective work of individuals. It's part of the ethos required for building high-trust groups.
Individuals within a group want to understand the terms under which a group operates, and in particular, how to extract their share of value from the group and how to maintain or enhance their extractable share of value.
The more the rules of a group are perceived to be fair, reciprocal and consistently applied, the more members can trust the group and each other. This relieves the participants of significant cognitive and emotional burden, allows longer-term collective action, and reduces transaction costs dramatically.
But I can intellectually understand the value of opportunistic defection strategies that "cheat" the group, extracting both an unfair share of value (as well as some of the "embodied trust value" resulting in an incremental loss of trust across the group).
I have a personal commitment to honest behavior and I actively avoid low-trust friends, groups and choices. Possibly because I find low-trust situations too stressful and too much work, as well as morally horrifying (whatever that means!) I'd like to believe that I'm fundamentally a "good person" but I acknowledge that it might just be that I'm unwilling to leave the local maximum high-trust situation I've self-selected for throughout my life, or I'm afraid of the risks of defector strategies (or I'm just cognitively and emotionally unsuited to them).
Here's where it gets complicated, because organizations change, trust levels change, the signifiers of trustability change, organizations lie, sometimes organizations are specifically operated to trap and exploit high-honor people, and people have very different ideas about what constitutes "fairness" or "exploitation". I find it hard to criticize someone who chooses to use low-trust tactics against a low-trust or deceptive group.
It seems, looking around different cultures and organizations in the world that there is a huge variation in the principles under which groups function. Apparently "low-trust" is a viable option, although I'm supportive of the idea that high-trust brings a competitive advantage both for groups and individuals, and is worth building and sustaining.
I'm horrified that we seem to have reached some kind of tipping point in the west where a critical mass of elites (who already extract enormous value!) have decided they can extract even more value through high-order defection than by building modern and durable foundations of trust.
what kind of information is in twitter that does not exist elsewhere? i never remember searching for something and ending up to find the answer in twitter
One could argue that centralized surveillance capitalism companies are unethical to start with. In the hands of a billionaire seeking to make them more profitable at all costs, they can become dangerous weapons.
The ethical thing for Twitter engineers to do is sit back and watch Twitter burn and potentially think about how to help someone like Jack build the open source decentralized alternative he has been musing about.
Comments like this make me wonder just how divergent peoples outlook on life are.
I’m with the guy you responded too, making a billionaire lose money is way funnier and interesting.
But even in a normal company, I never really understood this loyalty/ethics thing.
To me, it makes sense to do the very, very bear minimum and “steal” as much time as possible. So you can use it for your self.
A job is you selling time to someone else. It’s simply incomprehensible to me someone would willingly give extra of their time. Equally not attempted to claw back as much as their time as possible.
I suppose there’s an element of game theory, there are points in time where it’s worth to go that extra mile to achieve something that will put you in a better position, but those are the exceptions not the rule.
Not judging you, I’m glad people like you are out there. My life is better due to people like you and I am thankful for that. But, yeah, I guess I’m just fascinated at the differences in outlook.
When you ask you accountant to do your accounts so you don't get hugely screwed by the tax man then you expect/hope that they will do their best work in your interest.
When you go to the dentist and need a broken tooth fixed you hope the dentist will take an extra 15 minutes if it means your fixed tooth will look as straight and nice as possible, even if they could have fixed the core issue in a much faster way and leave you with an aesthetically unpleasant looking tooth.
When you send your children to school you hope that teachers would sacrifice time from their own lunch break if your kid has one more question just before the break so they don't fail the next exam.
If you live in America you probably hope that the person who guards the gate to your child's school would wait an extra 20 minutes if the new guard is slightly late so no crazy gunman could just walk in unchallenged and gun down your child.
When your parents end up frail and end up requiring social care you'd hope that the people looking after them would not just do the "bare minimum and steal as much time as possible for their own benefit" and rather take pride and care when looking after them.
All those people also hope that if you work on a product that serves a public interest that you will do your utmost best to return the favour so everyone can live in a nice society.
People do their utmost because of mutual respect, and because of the expectation of conducting repeat business - not because of honor.
Try telling your elderly parents' social worker you want to gauge their performance, because you're shopping around for someone new, and only A-players are acceptable. Then watch how much care and kindness your parents receive out of honor alone.
Going above the call of duty for "honor" is not a virtue. It's being a doormat.
That's why people consider those real jobs and think people who work at Twitter should not complain about anything. I'm not saying they are right, but I don't think you made your point at all.
But you must understand taking pride in your work. I don't know if I'd have called it honorable, but there is certainly no honor in sneakily doing shitty work on purpose. I wouldn't write software if it didn't give me satisfaction, and doing a shitty job is never satisfying.
Poster didn't even talk about giving additional time, just faithfully fulfilling their end of the employment contract. It's bare minimum respect to your coworkers and clients/users to care about your work and make it as polished as you can.
A mentality of doing as little as possible makes life harder for the people around you as well. Twitter is low-stakes; no one will die due to some developer slacking off, but if you don't want to participate, then the least you can do is leave.
If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000 talented folks off the street for the venture, I mean if Travis K could raise almost a billion for his shitty ghost kitchen venture I'd have to think they could get enough runway to get something launched pretty quickly.
There's so many "What we should do" moments that are too expensive or deviate too far from the core business that don't get developed in most enterprises that could be pursued when starting from a blank slate.
The success of most* social media platforms was largely unconnected with the developers who built it or the underlying software. You can't just hire a few hundred retrenched developers and expect to come up with a successful social media platform after some number of months. Timing, marketing, and user psychology are much more important.
* I'd say TikTok is the exception, because delivering (a) instantaneous video and (b) useful algorithmic recommendations is a technically difficult proposition. But at the same time, I'd argue their success was driven largely by the music licensing deals they initially cut (and their insane marketing spend), which is what caused their early growth.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but in this hypothetical I'm envisioning this a bit differently then a completely new social network so much as Twitter 2.0 with a very direct focus on getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter. I should also be clear that I'm assuming a relatively proportional level of talent across Product, Design etc too not just retrenched engineers.
>getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter
Why would someone switch from Twitter? If anything, you might expect more freedom of speech and less bots on Twitter. On the parallel Twitter the maximum you can expect is the old Twitter minus some functionality, plus some offline time and some bugs.
It's not hard to have a free speech platform. It's hard to have a useful speech platform. Useful speech probably requires editing and moderation and so far it's pretty clear algorithms and upvote/downvote systems aren't terribly good at it.
It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample evidence that allowing everyone to say everything they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with substantial and meaningful debate.
It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample evidence that not allowing everyone to say everything they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with substantial and meaningful debate.
I have a fairly plausible mechanism behind my observation: Getting your thoughts published and disseminated used to require buy in from a wide range of people, the publishers essentially.
Publishers edited and moderated what they published so they could gain a reputation as trustworthy or sensationalist. Maintaining that reputation was essential for the business. Who would buy a newspaper with a reputation for false reporting?
Removing the publishers at replacing them with algorithms designed to maximize engagement removed this intermediate layer of reputation checks. Further as the infrastructure is paid for exclusively by ads and those can be targeted fairly well, engagement is far more important than platform reputation. This has reduced the level of public discourse markedly and wrong and discredited opinions can gain substantial audiences and establish strong societal narratives with no "human editor in the loop".
This we are seeing an influence of conspiracy theoretical thinking on advanced democracies that would have been unthinkable even in the 90s.
“as the infrastructure is paid for exclusively by ads and those can be targeted fairly well, engagement is far more important than platform reputation”
This is the key problem for sure, but it applies to all content providers from the largest publishers to tiny “publishers” like you and I when we post a comment on a site that is ad-supported. To take away people’s freedom of expression due to the revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free, advanced society.
You suggest that there should be gatekeepers to verify the reputation and veracity of content and the individual posting the content, but these gatekeepers are themselves biased and unable to know the “truth” in most situations as there is a debate about what is the truth. Stifling debate through this filter is detrimental to discourse and results in group-think and a general lack of creative thought. It is generally unscientific and authoritarian, which history (very recent history at that) has proven quite clearly.
> To take away people’s freedom of expression due to the revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free, advanced society.
This is the rhetorical slight of hand due to which any meaningful discussion of this topic is impossible on Hacker News. I talk about a lack of moderation and editorial work and you reply about "taking away peoples freedom of expression".
Put another way, 30 years ago it was not considered a limit on your freedom of expression if you couldn't get your conspiracy theory published in any news paper. Today you argue/feel like it is a limit on your freedom of expression if you can't publish it on social media.
> these gatekeepers are themselves biased and unable to know the “truth” in most situations as there is a debate about what is the truth.
First, it is not always true that there is a debate about what is the truth. Secondly, if there is only one gatekeeper (e.g. the state) this is obviously detrimental to discourse. But if there is a multitude of gatekeepers, and if there is a strong culture of accepting high quality divergent opinions, it is not.
> Stifling debate through this filter is detrimental to discourse
Non sequitur! You assume that the gatekeepers will control by alignment with their own opinion, rather than by quality. That's a danger, but there are mechanisms against it. If there is a healthy landscape of publishers this is something that can be demonstrated and will become known because competing publishers have an interest in exposing this.
(If all your media is owned by Murdoch you have a problem anyway).
> It is generally unscientific and authoritarian, which history (very recent history at that) has proven quite clearly.
What historical precedence are you thinking about with this?
I think science is an excellent example, and as a scientist I am well familiar with scientific discourse, and how it functions. It does absolutely _not_ function as a free for all. First of all, if you can't get your stuff published in a reputable journal nobody will take you serious. Generally to be part of the scientific discourse you are expected to demonstrate solid understanding of the underlying material. You will not get to speak at a conference unless you have demonstrated this to a number of reputable scientists who will vouch for you in the program committee.
What this comes down to is simply this: A healthy discourse in which the best ideas win and new ideas can be tried out requires structure. In a free for all, there is no guarantee that the best idea wins, in fact you would expect the most easily amplified and persuasive idea to win. Ease of amplification will depend on the medium and humans can be persuaded of any number of things that are blatantly untrue rather easily.
We require so much structure in the scientific enterprise to guard against our own individual vanity and fallibility.
---
As an aside, something I have been meaning to read into more deeply but haven't looked at yet very much:
[Jürgen Habermas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas) has written extensively about the prerequisites for a discourse to work well, long before social media blew things wide open. I am sure there are plenty of thinkers that have tried to develop these ideas further into the contemporary setting.
> His most known work to date, the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), is based on an adaptation of Talcott Parsons AGIL Paradigm. In this work, Habermas voiced criticism of the process of modernization, which he saw as inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalization.[24] Habermas outlined how our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption.[24] These reinforcing trends rationalize public life.[24] Disfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one.[24] In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating.[24] Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens.[25] An "ideal speech situation"[26] requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors.[25] In this version of the consensus theory of truth Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.
For a scientist, you sure do ignore the facts of fallible human nature and basic mathematical set logic theory. These platforms are not newspapers and magazines printed by individual companies with a cultivated set of content creators; they are platforms that are open to all people in the world. Applying the same principal to these platforms is inconsistent and arbitrary.
“This is the rhetorical slight of hand due to which any meaningful discussion of this topic is impossible on Hacker News. I talk about a lack of moderation and editorial work and you reply about "taking away peoples freedom of expression".”
You fail to see that we are saying the same exact thing and your attempt to equivocate by avoiding stating the obvious that moderation and editorializing is restricting expression doesn’t pass muster with me. We will have to disagree on this.
“We require so much structure in the scientific enterprise to guard against our own individual vanity and fallibility.”
Yet vanity and fallibility still reign amongst scientists, especially given the way science is funded. I refuse to accept such a naive notion and blindly apply that principal to discourse amongst people.
I nowhere claimed that platforms are like newspapers. I claimed that newspapers provided a function that improved discourse and that has been lost.
I also claim that discussion of this function is made difficult by a blanket appeal to freedom of expression.
I don't claim that we already know how to replicate the function that the publishers played in the new world. But moderation is not censorship and freedom of expression is not entitlement to access to a platformn either.
Your last paragraph almost wilfully seems to miss my point. Scientific consensus works in the presence of fallibility and vanity. If it only would work in their absence it wouldn't work because it is a consensus among humans and humans are prone to both.
High quality discourse requires norms, moderation and rules. I challenge you to show any counter example. Most obviously, we are on a website that is actively moderated and has a long section of guidelines that are somewhat between norms and rules. Do you think the discourse here would be improved without these "limits on expression"?
Yes but this is good timing. A lot of people are pretty unsatisfied with Musk as a human lately and it seems like if there was an alternative available, people would go there quickly.
I've seen him say and do a lot of controversial and in my opinion very immoral things in the last year.
Maybe I'm just talking for myself but if I used Twitter, and a decent modern alternative existed, I'd at least make an account and hope other came along so I didn't have to be part of his "town square" or his "everything app" (which sounds like a nightmare).
I think Musk has done some good things in the past, but honestly, he seems like an asshole and increasingly willing to do questionable things for money and to protect his interests.
I don't use any of his products and I'd been more than happy if it stays that way.
Interesting. What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation? How does one go about ensuring they follow this no-asshole rule?
Many considered Steve Jobs to be an asshole. Do you use an apple product? How about Bill Gates and Microsoft? Or Linus and Linux? Or Amazon and Jeff Bezos? Or Oracle and Larry Ellison? Or Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg? Or …
Funny because I use Linux as my primary OS, while I think Linus can be abrasive, I don't think he is an asshole in the same way, because with Linus, it's not about money, in the same way that money is a thing for Musk or Gates. Woz built a lot of Apple and I feel his presence in a lot of their earlier stuff. He wasn't a money guy.
So I actually think I have a point.
I don't use FB because I don't like MZ, I try use Amazon as little as possible although sometimes, it's hard to avoid in some cases. I use an iPhone because I think Androids are less secure. I think Windows is a pathetic product and I've never liked it, I've never been a fan of Bill Gates and his ethos anyway. I'd actually avoid buying a Tesla because of false claims around self-driving and I'm also starting to feel like Tesla is synonymous with poor quality and issues.
So with all due respect, I'm not sure you have a great argument.
Life is (thankfully for me) about choices, and I'm making them.
Overall I personally agree with most all of those decisions. However, my decisions are made based on the product or business practices not my perception of the personality or political beliefs of their founders or significant contributors based on social media or news accounts.
Just because someone has an abrasive personality or differing political views doesn’t mean they are a worse person than someone who has a nice personality or similar political beliefs.
> What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation?
Asshole or not asshole, the role of a CEO of a public company is to sign off quality of life for the public.
Musk is not signing off anything. At best you could say that he's aspirationally signing off quality of life for people who are not even alive yet and would benefit from a less warm Earth. But that is contentious given that solving transportation alone won't solve climate change and Tesla for sure won't be the sole player in transportation. As a matter of fact it will be a small player and the electrification will be provided by the legacy OEM.
Character flaws pale compared to the big question: "What is this guy doing for me?" . There were no such questions with the other people you mentioned.
Fair question. Elon is definitely not the answer to all that ails the planet. Yes, electric cars are not a panacea: they require mining of nasty elements from the ground and (especially the batteries) must be disposed of properly; they still require electricity which is largely still created using fossil fuels.
For me, the big advantage is that electric cars can be charged from many root sources including solar, wind, and nuclear. These sources can be sourced locally to one’s home or at least within the country, which reduces the perpetual excuse for wars to secure access to fossil fuels. That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.
Also, I like his Don Quixotic nature. Charging forth into areas despite the naysayers and avoiding analysis paralysis by taking action and accomplishing some amazing feats with a team of people of course. We have enough tepid “leaders” who just want to copy other money-making ideas with easy fed money distributed by simple-minded venture capitalists.
He’s doing some things right. I am personally getting a big bucket of popcorn to watch what he does with Twitter and how he’s going to deal with all of the attacks from the government and individuals that are frightened of human beings expressing themselves more freely on Twitter.
> That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.
Which is a direction which doesn't benefit the quality of life of contemporaries in any way and it's contentious that it will benefit people living in the future.
When something benefits you, well you know because you use that stuff. Today is Sunday and I used dozens of different flavors of Microsoft. Same with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Exxon, BP, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, JPM...you get the gist. I don't suspect, I KNOW that Jobs was an asshole and so is Gates, not to mention Zuck and Dimon...but quality of life provided by company they direct, trumps assholery.
I can't say the same for any of Musk companies, and he's supposedly the GOAT and he's 51. Mind I am not a sub-saharan farmer , I am a well traveled person, but I never used one of his products or services, the closest I was when an Uber was supposed to come pick me up in a Tesla but canceled.
Interesting that you think he's done a lot of unethical things over the past year compared to previous ones... this is the year where a good half of starlink terminals in Ukraine are being SpaceX funded. Rather than the year he accused someone of being a pedophile or the year he refused to comply with covid regs.
He did also threaten to shut them down after receiving flack for suggesting that a sovereign country give up part of it's territory to a lunatic, so yeah, still not a great year.
Which he said not long after the comments were made, so maybe it's coincidental, but I mean, there was never any talk of having problems paying before the anti-musk comments were made.
Switching cost is 0 as long as your friends are on the other platform. Just get enough people pissed off at elon to "try" out the new service and enough might stick around.
The only value Twitter has is network effects, the old leadership clearly didn't show much capacity of adding value and as much as people hate Elon it's not like Twitter didn't come under critics before.
Starting a new social network with "it's not run by those dicks" has not been a particularly successful move, anecdotically.
America's Left and Right are in general both quite skewed to the right. Our right wing party here in Australia would be considered left in America. The American left wing party is still considered right wing through the Australian political lens.
I'm hesitating to say through the global lens, since I just don't know. But my inkling would be that the majority of the western world has a similar political outlook. America has perverted it's political compass I feel.
Arresting people for going into a local park is considered to be more left wing? Locking down people is considered to be more left wing? The draconian, authoritarian measures taken in Australia surrounding its covid response were truly shocking.
You can't gauge Australia's general policymaking from what was an unprecedented event in our history, we were in a state of emergency, it can be hard to get every decision right in such a situation. I'm not sure how informed you are on the matter, but it was also state lead not a federal response. Some states were barely affected, some states threw away the precautions pretty quickly. Victoria had it the hardest, and I don't agree with the level of lockdown there. But it was also the decisions of one guy, who we elected, Dan Andrews, on the advice of his health officials. This is why we have a democracy, we vote him out if his decisions were bad.
>You can't gauge Australia's general policymaking from what was an unprecedented event in our history, we were in a state of emergency, it can be hard to get every decision right in such a situation
That is the perfect time to judge people. If somebody is willing to abandon their principles when it is a challenging situation then you can't trust them. Anybody can stick to their principles when everything is going well.
I don't think we should just ignore the 99% of the rest of our political history, including the actual policies we have right now, and the politicians we have right now, in favour of painting our own commentary of Australian politics overall based on the pandemic response. We should call it what it was, which was neither left nor right, but a bout of authoritarianism. That is something Australia actually does have a trend towards.
I agree that might be when you judge a politician, hence why I brought up voting, but that isn't even what we are talking about.
Twitter isn’t some engineering marvel. Anyone could go build a scalable Twitter clone. There are a handful of competitors on the market and a few open source projects. All things considered, it’s easy.
Arguably Twitter wasn't trying even the most obvious things that were laying on the surface, e.g. account fees, or tweet promotion to one's existing followers, or fees for following, etc.
It's an excellent platform for dissiminating information to interested parties, and it doesn't have to be ads. We have a company's account and we'd paying if they's allow us.
Plus they are bloated as hell, which is also contributing to their business apathy.
Twitter gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022 was $3.181B, a 11.24% increase year-over-year. Twitter annual gross profit for 2021 was $3.28B, a 39.58% increase from 2020.
True but as with all tech companies at the moment Twitter is also going to feel the pinch and they don't have the business size to wear it as well as the others.
"Only someone with the raw talent and vision of Elon can make twitter profitable" has effectively said by many here.
That twitter is already profitable either means a) the current team are on the same giga-genius level as Elon or b) people are talking absolute nonsense.
Twitter might be better able to survive the pinch - or would have before being lumped with a massive pile of debt. They have 2 costs; servers and staff and one revenue stream; advertising. Simple model and easy to balance the two sides of the equation.
Before the Musk buyout they paid $51mil to service the small amount of debt they had, post the takeover they will be paying ~$1bil to service the debts he has added to their balance sheet.
Not really. Twitter is really a very simple messaging system with messages being public.
If you take some pub sub like Kafka, Nats or RabbitMQ and bolt some code into it, it really is trivial. You scale by using Kubernetes for services and by sharding and replicating the DBs. It's really easy these days.
This is pretty much like saying that Dropbox can be trivially replicated with rsync(1) or that one can code Uber in a weekend. Perhaps you can do so at small scale for yourself and your friends. The essence of Twitter (or Dropbox, or Uber) is indeed quite simple.
However there's orders of magnitude more effort that goes into:
* Usability
* Performance
* Stability
* Security
* Localisation/internationalisation and accounting for cultural differences
* ... and thousands of little things that will come up when building something big.
Think of this another way... Twitter would not employ literally thousands of employees if there was nothing for them to do. It is not a charity. I don't buy that building anything that can handle hundred of millions of users is simple.
One can say that aforementioned classes of problems are semantically, conceptually different from scalability, but they will inevitably come up when building something the scale of Twitter and will require mountains of technical work to deal with.
>half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch
That would probably amount in $0. Twitter wasn't profitable and part of it was its CEO. Why would investors be willing to lose money, especially in the current economic situation?
I would rather wait for Elon to stabilize Twitter and go public again.
Twitter wasn't too far off profitability. I looked at the numbers and you could definitely get it to profitability by reducing staff numbers and relocating to much cheaper places (literally anywhere except SV).
I think their loss was around $200m/year and staff costs around $300m/year. Something like that. SV salaries are easily double or triple European salaries.
> If these numbers are right and they're laying off 50% the workforce, half of me wonders how much Parag could raise to build a new Twitter from scratch and just hire 500 - 1000 talented folks off the street for the venture
Is Parag a startup entrepreneur, or more of a going-concern executive? Startup seems more Dorsey’s thing—who made more money on the deal and took his new social media effort out of stealth as soon as the Twitter sale was finalized.
Didn't Kalanick raise that money for his "shitty ghost kitchen venture" after using Uber Eats to prove that the model would actually be more lucrative than the cab-service?
I've thought the same thing, while Twitter is hard to scale, it's pretty freaking simple product to build, if I had a bit of spare time, I'd be building a clone right now so as everyone leaves Musk's platform they have a place to go.
There are probably Twitter alternatives laying on GitHub. How much people would you expect leaving Musks platform for another one? Are you willing to bet your life savings on it? I hope not, at least not without solid market research.
> Didn't he just get a golden parachute of around 54 Million dollars?
I think he got some from stock in the sale, but Musk is characterizing his firing as “for cause” to deny (or at least stall pending legal action) Parag’s golden parachute (same with the other Twitter execs.)
Because they don't have a union so they were excluded from all the big-boy negotiations at the sale, and they've no way to resist the demands of their bosses. They can put up, or shut up. Or just complain pathetically.
Facebook is out of cash. And even if they were expanding, Facebook is orders of magnitude more complex, is not sure all ex Twitter employees would have been a good match for Facebook.
Oh come now. Tumblr didn’t fail due to engineers sabotaging it. It failed because the new owners decided that they were too squeamish for porn and it turned out that porn was what sustained Tumblr. This was Yahoo simply not understanding what the product actually was.
I mean there is still not porn on Tumblr and Automattic has been a good steward of it. Verizon lost a billion dollars because they bet on a growth play for a mature social network where their new owners are running it like a lifestyle business.
I would argue that when Yahoo decided to remove all the porn off Tumblr that it caused a major brain drain that took a long time to recover. It also soured the relationship between bloggers and Yahoo. There was no way for the same entity to pull out of that nose dive but a bit of time and new ownership helped pivot Tumblr to a slightly different crowd.
The crowd that isn’t happy with Musk probably wouldn’t be happy with Theil… Musk is asshat saying stupid things. While Theil is both further in the same political direction and much smarter.
Passively destroying Twitter from within by not trying, and trying to make a billionare lose 44 billion dollars is a significantly more fun and interesting challenge than making Twitter a better product.