[709]

Originally Posted by drewprops And it's done. ...

Cooked. You might say. I give it less than a year before it becomes MuskChan and implodes.

There must have been some serious shit to be found in discovery if Elon paid that much just to avoid going to trial. Or his lawyers just flat out told him he would lose, but when has that ever stopped the rich and powerful?

[PB PM]

Not surprised, although I kind of figured he might try to weasel his way out again at the last minute. Whoever owns twitter doesn’t matter, it’s still worthless.

[turtle]

Let that sink in



You have to give him some style points there.

Edit: just read this:

Musk sacked chief executive Parag Agrawal, as well as the company's chief financial officer and its head of legal policy, trust and safety, the Washington Post and CNBC reported citing unnamed sources.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised he booted those who forced him into the deal. Not like they were going to get along anyway. Heck, given Musk didn't like they way they ran things I knew it was only a matter of time, I just didn't expect it on day one.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle Let that sink in You have to give him some style points there.

For context, that's kind of a ca-2010 reddit joke. I mean, it's funny, but it feels a lot less funny given the circumstances. "Haha, I'm firing the old establishment and 75% of staff. lmao"

Edit: just read this:

Originally Posted by turtle I guess I shouldn't be surprised he booted those who forced him into the deal. Not like they were going to get along anyway. Heck, given Musk didn't like they way they ran things I knew it was only a matter of time, I just didn't expect it on day one.

Yeah, it makes sense for the CEO and CFO to be gone.

But the "head of legal policy, trust and safety" is a bit more troubling. She's said to have had a positive impact on dealing with hate speech, moderation, etc.

The most optimistic outlook here, IMHO, is that Elon is gonna find out the hard way why moderation is a good thing.

[Ryan]

Vijaya (head of policy/legal) has done more to fight for free speech around the world than just about anyone. She led all of Twitter's fights against governments who tried to silence speech or unmask dissidents. Her departure is a bad sign.

[turtle]

"MuskChan" seems like it just might be the new name shortly.

[Bryson]

I'm getting weirdly non-targeted ads on Twitter all of a sudden. I guess the ad people have decided to just phone it in if they're getting fired anyway.

[709]

The brutal truth.

I will require🍿.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by 709 The brutal truth. I will require🍿.

I agree with the analysis that Elon is likely underestimating how untenable "free speech" is in practice. (Imagine what AppleNova at its high-traffic heyday would have been like without rules…)

But I think this part is a bit of a head-scratcher:

"The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars."

So… dogfooding a product is now bad?

[709]

Well, no, but as the old adage goes "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?".

I mean, if he really, truly thinks that Twitter will be better under his watch, I wish him the best. But he didn't have to buy the company if it wasn't for his big mouth/ego, and he was surely getting enough use out of it without the hassle of ownership.

[chucker]

Sure, but he bought the cow because he really does think he can produce milk that is more to his liking. (Good luck with that, I guess?)

[709]

Truly feels like a Brothers Grimm story though, doesn't it? Guy runs his mouth of how shitty the cow's milk is, talks about how much better it would be if he owned the cow, in a moment of hubris offers way more gold than the cow is worth, gets stuck with cow after trying to backpedal on the agreement, fires the current milkers and barnskeepers, and here we are while he attempts to spin the story in his favor while not really knowing how to milk a cow or clean a barn, just that he has an idea of what milk should taste like.

A story as old as time itself.

[PB PM]

Fools do tend to rush in. Musk has been lucky with his earlier buys, but somehow I think Twitter is going to hurt him.

[Ryan]

He's now the global face on content moderation. Every country is going to be knocking on his door demanding he make Twitter kowtow to them or face consequences for his other companies.

He has stepped in it in a *big* way.

[drewprops]

Jack Dorsey is about to found a NEW social media platform...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-...b044fae3e9d0a8


...

[kscherer]

Oh, good. Just what the world needs.

Hopefully, it's a platform that only allows posts that do not offend anyone!

[turtle]

Who cares if it does offend someone? Don't follow them if they offend you.

It works really well actually. Then again it is little different than IRL too, I don't hang around people I don't like. I don't try to silence them because I don't like them, I just live my life without them in it.

Same goes for Twitter after it gets the makeover Musk has in mind. Don't follow people you don't like. Kinda like it works now actually.

Given Musk is reported as firing his board, this might just be in the works.

[kscherer]

Originally Posted by turtle Who cares if it does offend someone? Don't follow them if they offend you.

It's a joke. A platform that only allows posts that do not offend anyone is no platform at all.

[turtle]

Sorry I missed that one. I'll do better next time!

Looking at this post though I noticed all the old threads below and some members I actually miss seeing around here. :sigh:

[drewprops]

I hope Paul is okay. It was great to have him back in here to keep things stirred up. Wherever he is I hope he's enjoying Andor!

...

[Ryan]

Based on how this prick is treating the rank and file I desperately hope he chokes on a toothpick tonight.

[drewprops]

Originally Posted by Ryan Based on how this prick is treating the rank and file I desperately hope he chokes on a toothpick tonight.

What are we going to do with YOU?
Is it time to launch our own social network?


...

[Frank777]

Why DOES a company like Twitter need 7,500 employees?

It seems wildly out of whack with Silicon Valley standards. And this company has hardly ever made a profit.

[tomoe]

What about having 7500 employees seems out of whack by Silicon Valley standards?

And what do you mean by “Silicon Valley standards”?

[Frank777]

Originally Posted by tomoe What about having 7500 employees seems out of whack by Silicon Valley standards? And what do you mean by “Silicon Valley standards”?

In 2020, Twitter made $5B on a largely text-based platform that has been going since the early 2000's.
Nobody's going to be able to convince me there's a huge amount of R&D going on at Twitter.

By contrast, Zoom has gotten smaller post-pandemic, but their 2020 was $4B+ and they made do with 2,700 employees.

[Ryan]

Running a service as sprawling and complex as Twitter is a huge task and takes a LOT of people. There's far more to the service than just tweets.

You've got your platform teams building all the underlying infrastructure. Twitter predates the cloud—literally, Twitter launched one week before AWS—and runs almost everything in its own data centers. There are teams running various internal storage and messaging systems, some of which had to be custom-built because nothing else could handle their scale back then. Twitter operates some of the largest Hadoop clusters in the world, that requires a lot of manpower to keep running.

You've got the teams in charge of the consumer experience. Twitter.com, the mobile apps, etc. There's a team maintaining notifications, another maintaining DMs, yet another in charge of the home timeline. Add to that product managers, user experience researchers, data scientists, internationalization teams and far, far more.

Then you've got the revenue side of the company. Building an ad network this size is, again, non-trivial. There's a team maintaining payments infrastructure, another building the internal tooling to manage ads, another building sales tools to sell the ads. And then of course the sales team itself, which is sprawling and worldwide.

Twitter handles a lot of data. That in turn requires a lot of privacy engineers and security specialists to keep it safe.

My last big project was an external-facing API to let developer customers hydrate the status of billions of tweets in a matter of minutes to determine which ones they needed to delete from their own storage. I led five other engineers on that project. Now imagine how many other unseen features the company needs to build and how many five-person teams you're going to need to get there.

Just the API platform required over 100 engineers, another dozen product managers, 100+ sales people and so on.

You need a small army of lawyers given the constant legal battles the company faces around the world. How many accountants and business analysts do you think it takes to operate in 100+ countries?

Companies like Zoom and Whatsapp are poor comparisons given the product differences. Those are one-to-one or one-to-few and they're not multi-sided marketplaces. Zoom's product surface is minuscule compared to a social network. Twitter is realtime many-to-many messaging with an ad market bolted on top.

[Frank777]

Now you see, that's the way to answer a question on a message board.

[chucker]

Zoom doesn’t need to sell ads, doesn’t need a moderation team, has a simpler task of government compliance (since it’s content is largely ephemeral), is largely peer-to-peer so has lower traffic and storage requirements, …

[drewprops]

Thank you for that overview of operations. I had a very rough guess at many of the areas where the company was staffed, but missed a few.

The data platform blew me away, as I wasn't tracking the history of data centers. I remember when Steve Jobs explained Akamai in a keynote, and I've had to poke around in AWS before (mind blowing when you're untrained in server management (it's menus all the way down)).

I would say that you just scared me off of developing a new social media platform, but knowing what you know NOW, how successful do you think Mr. Dorsey will be with a new platform?

Being able to "start over" unencumbered by legacy systems could be exciting.

I've been waiting for a self-assembling social media platform for 15 years now; every user has outward facing knobs that can connect to others without a walled garden. All the pieces are in place now; storage, streaming video, etc..


...

[chucker]

Originally Posted by drewprops I've been waiting for a self-assembling social media platform for 15 years now; every user has outward facing knobs that can connect to others without a walled garden. All the pieces are in place now; storage, streaming video, etc..

I don't think everyone hosting their own instance is practical for numerous reasons.

• most people are now on mobile OSes, which make this kind of background task hard or impossible
• most people would prefer not to spend time each week playing janitor for their server. Especially not once something goes awry.
• it puts huge resource strains on sync. Most people don't have the kind of high bandwidth/low latency to make that practical
• it's a complete free-for-all in terms of moderation and spam. You may think that's desirable but you'll quickly change your mind.

That's why federation, such as on Mastodon, is a smarter compromise. You can run it yourself if you want, but you can also have your trusted neighbor kid do it.