zlacker

Except, progress grinding to a halt pretty much described Twitter before Elon Musk too. The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels.

The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.

The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

>>uncone+(OP)
There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

>>uncone+(OP)
Unless you have some information I don’t, Twitter is way below its pre-pandemic staffing levels. Obviously hard to tell exactly how low they went as they’re not public anymore, but this is quite different from Meta and such that really did just go back to pre-pandemic level. CNBC say Twitter is at 1300 people, a drop of 80%. It’s mind boggling.

>>uncone+(OP)
Name another tech company that lost 80% of its employees.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer...

>>uncone+(OP)
> The story that anyone who knew anything was let go is just that, a story, as the number of employees by year shows Twitter, and other tech companies in the same period, overhired and then went back to pre-2020 levels.

Citation needed. Show me the 2020 Twitter headcount. Show me the 2023 Twitter headcount.

> The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.

That is not the 'only difference'. There is also the matter of all the hate speech. Which I guess you don't really notice, as you're not one of the targets, but I sure am. This is like Trump going 'boo hoo everyone hates me because I'm Donald Trump,' when in fact there is this small matter of an armed insurrection. You are writing off the valid political concerns of your opponents as being rooted in personality, rather than in odious politics.

> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side.

This is the most reality-defying way of recalling that the entire company basically quit on him overnight, but ok, bro

> Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.

That is not the reason we are anticipating its failure. We are anticipating its failure because we understand how people, platforms, and software interact. 'Hope' has nothing to do with it; we just read it off the verniers.

>>beaned+11
As a software developer, I hate the way he treats his employees. Politics are secondary.

>>uncone+(OP)
You claim with a straight face that, had Musk not taken over Twitter, it would have had the same rate of outages and level of degradation as it does now? It's completely obvious to anyone familiar with the stability of Twitter pre and post Musk that his takeover was an inflection point. You're ignoring reality in order to support a claim that fired non-coders and "diversity hires" contributed nothing.

>>uncone+(OP)
This narrative just about washed when Musk hadn’t had time to get his feet under the table, and all we could speak about is “Elon could!”

The data is in now!

>>uncone+(OP)
> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the ... diversity ... side.

Your statement is gross.

>>uncone+(OP)
>has made way for free-speech

Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it:

Ryan Mac

Drew Harwell

Micah Lee

Matt Binder

Aaron Rupar

Donie O’Sullivan

Tony Webster

EDIT: these bans were related to reporting on the elonjet tracking account that was banned. He didn’t just ban the account he didn’t like, he banned the accounts of journalists who talked about that.

>>beaned+11
I hate Elon's politics but want Twitter succeed.

And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.

>>ineeda+x3
For posterity, those journalists were banned (unbanned a few months later) for just reporting on ElonJet, who used publicly available FAA data to track Elon's jet. Elon called it doxxing. And also temporarily banned links to Mastodon just to prevent people from accessing ElonJet that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet

>>beaned+11
It is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- entirely OK to root for the failure of a company that is owned, directed and dominated by an odious person with abhorrent politics.

Compare:

- hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux

- hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens

- hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery

- (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc

and so forth.

There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.

>>uncone+(OP)
What a fantastically bad take supported by no facts whatsoever. I like your graphics work but you should really think before you type this kind of a thing up.

>>minima+O4
Good point, they were all related as bans resulting from reporting or tweeting about the elonjet ban. I edited my comment accordingly since it’s important context to know the ones I mentioned were all related to a single event (though he’s silenced others as well for different reasons too)

>>beaned+11
That's... a perfectly reasonable position to hold?

>>beaned+11
And now that he's opened his big fat mouth and revealed just what kind of a person he really is, I'm also rooting for unconed to fail because of his politics.

>>Negati+t3
His statements were dumb in many ways, but your hand-wringing is gross and un-constructive.

>>beaned+11
Fascists don't have politics, they have hatred.

>>1attic+w5
I like Michael Hobbes's succinct gripe regarding the "debate RFK" nonsense about a week ago (alas, on Twitter, hence no link to the thread):

> The problem with this asinine debate over debating is that everyone is trying to come up with a content-neutral principle.

>>tadfis+G6
I think its like, totally reasonable? to want the Gates Foundation to like implode and everybody who works for it to be unemployed? and all those poor African kids to go unvaccinated?

Because I kinda think Bill Gates has bad politics?

>>1attic+L1
who is 'we' and why are they the same group as the 'lot of people'?

>>ineeda+x3
More recently he banned Aaron Greenspan, founder of Plainsite, and prominent Elon Musk critic. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspen...

>>1attic+w5
And speaking of having no gotcha but just being gotten, if you have showdead=true you can see one of Musk's biggest stans trevioustrouble rolling out their very best most deep and thoughtful arguments in support of Musk:

>>36556393

>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

>It’s just a feed, and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users. No need to pull out your philosophy-degree. The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason and if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.

>* PS: Dislike my comment fags

And then they sum up their politics and best arguments and what the Twitter they're fighting so hard for and what Musk they worship so much is all about, in just one word:

>>36556423

>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

>fag

And that's the best they've got.

It really makes Musk's apologists so angry and frustrated to see everyone laughing their asses off at Musk explosively and bloodily sharting himself in public like that, because now they have to follow behind the elephant and wipe up all the mess.

>>0xcde4+y7
I think the bigger problem there is that RFK could win the debate but that still wouldn't make vaccines cause autism.

>>JPws_P+B7
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a charity. Twitter is a for-profit social network. These are not particularly comparable.

>>0xcde4+y7
Disclaimer: I'm not American and have only the foggiest notion of who RFK is, but the urge to identify boundary conditions for 'permissible wants' does feel especially America-y to me. I speculate that it has something to do with the veneration given to markets --- the underlying anxiety being that having feelings about an intensely cultural use of forty billion dollars is somehow antithetical to the conduct befitting an ideal rational agent.

>>ineeda+x3
Elonjet was bait by people with an axe to grind and a chip on their shoulder, and if this isn't blindingly obvious, I have a bridge to sell you.

There is no doubt that, after firing Vijaya Gadde (sp?), the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet, and more towards letting people say what they want. This does not mean every single tweet is left up, or that annoying Elon isn't a catastrophically stupid thing for journalists to do.

Do you dispute this?

>>benzib+02
No, you claim that I am claiming that.

What I claim is that: - OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button? - Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true - Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.

>>Negati+t3
Your statement is an admission that you prefer to judge messages for their implied moral valence instead of their truth content. Personally I find that pathetic.

>>miunau+X5
Twitter went from a 4.9k headcount in Dec 2019, to 7.5k in Dec 2021. Fact.

I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return.

What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.

>>bloope+j7
As you can see from Mussolini's own writing on the Doctrine of Fascism, they hate individualism, and love the State.

>7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State;

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html

Prior to Twitter's acquisition by Musk, they worked quite closely with the State and even hired the former top FBI lawyer as their chief legal counsel.

>>ineeda+d6
How embarrassing, I have never heard of those people! Here are some journalists or whistleblowers I have heard of:

- Daniel Ellsberg - Julian Assange - Glenn Greenwald - Seymour Hirsch - Chelsea Manning

>>tadfis+G6
Is it..? All the replies to this thread just mention how he has abhorrent politics but there's no specifics. I'm not sure anyone really knows why they dislike him, and thought critically about it. A lot of it seems assumption-based, fed mostly by the media who is Twitter's biggest competitor. And on Hacker News, of all places. I'd think it the most likely place to find people who understand the rift between tech and trad media, and that character assassination is the biggest tool used by one particular side in this war. Instead the middling tech armchair specialists who partake in and promote the culture that birthed Elon and his multitude of companies have bought the other side's narrative to hate on their own.

>>uncone+Ad1
And now they’re down to 2,300 according to Musk. Those are huge layoffs, even if we take pre pandemic staffing numbers as a baseline.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46...

>>uncone+Lc1
Nope! From your original post: "The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top"

Claiming that nothing is different other than Elon's presence implies that Twitter was just as much of a technical dumpster fire as it is now. That is not _at all_ what you're now claiming you said, which is, effectively, "Twitter made slow progress on product priorities". No one disputes that, but it's not what we're discussing here, which is the rapid degradation of service since Musk took over. Maybe those "diversity hires", as you call them, actually contributed to keeping the site running.

>>inpdx+M1
Do the people who actually work for his companies generally feel the same way?

>>uncone+Gc1
> There is no doubt that [...] the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet

It is absolutely unbelievable that anyone could say this when every Tweet is currently censored to non-members.

I've traditionally considered the Dorsey administration to be the worse steward, but this is an insane take to steelman considering how self-conscious the past few months of banning has gotten.

>>beaned+11
It’s not his politics, it’s him personally. Many find him an arrogant, loathesome baffoon and an asshole, even outside of the political realm. Obviously many people are rooting for him to fail.

>>1attic+w5
None of your examples actually align with the general sentiment here. In your examples, you cite specific goals that should fail, which may be part of a broader approach which includes more noble goals.

For example, you say that Microsoft should fail in attempting to snuff out Linux, not that Microsoft should fail generally.

You say that the USSR should fail to kill their own people, not that the USSR should fail to thrive as a people or a nation.

In this case the equivalent would be to call for Twitter to fail at... what exactly? Free speech?

I think you've been gotten. You don't perceive these examples as equivocations when they are, and it is blinded by dislike for a figure you disagree with rather than a specific bad goal.