Twitter C/D

mailchimp ceo and his cofounder are psychotic, so many employees were fleeced

I was in a dept once where people routinely bragged about hours worked and giving up their PTO and letting it expire, it was like "weird flex but go off"

i can totally understand working super hard and being gratified, after it was over, that you helped build something

i understand it much less when the task at hand is basically 'destroying the product because a billionaire says so'

More Esther Crawford

Having a nightly standup is bad enough, but imagine holding one while everyone around you is being unceremoniously fired pic.twitter.com/aumYS2LW1V

— Shantini Vyas (@shantinix) November 4, 2022

To illustrate the chaos: some employees working on Twitter Blue, Musk’s revamped subscription service, were asked to join a video call as colleagues were being laid off last night. During that call, one person lost access, presumably because they were cut. https://t.co/za9DZtjFOY pic.twitter.com/dfZaGIwfgw

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) November 4, 2022

I don’t get the impression she’s especially bad relative to the other managers who are staying, all of whom are classic rise and grind types. She’s getting a lot of attention because she happens to be responsible for the first thing they’re trying to ship.

Desperately screenshotting Dril tweets like I'm trying to save scrolls from the Library of Alexandria as it burns.

— Richy Craven (@RichyCraven) November 4, 2022

9:30pm standup? lol

I was previously unfamiliar with the term "standup" in this context, and thought you were talking about a comedian doing a routine on a stage while sacked employees carried their boxes out.

What is the deal with layoffs?

Better to be laid off by Elon than laid on by him, amirite? *rimshot*

I'll be here all week folks! oh hang on

Straight up now tell me did you really think you'd work here forever

No no no

tesla got u in a hit and run

i truly believe that i will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity when i get every single post on hthis fucking website deleted by 2022

— wint (@dril) August 24, 2017

Feeling sorry for good people who got to show something on the app and get opportunities through it.

Not to be overly sincere on main about Twitter, but I think if it does go down something that will be lost is something it offered to me. I started tweeting in my late teens, at a time when I was not in a great place mentally and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life

— Mollie Goodfellow (@hansmollman) November 6, 2022

yeah it is an essential broadcast/networking service for a lot of people

" The moonlight on the bayou

A creole tune that fills the air

I dream about Magnolias in June

And soon I'm wishing that I was there"

Also lol

pic.twitter.com/BM1tksiMA0

— Rochelle (@rochdowdenlordy) November 6, 2022

twitter wouldn't load for me for over a minute a little while ago; first time I've seen that in years and year. may have been on my end, I guess, but my gut says no

I don’t get the impression she’s especially bad relative to the other managers who are staying, all of whom are classic rise and grind types. She’s getting a lot of attention because she happens to be responsible for the first thing they’re trying to ship.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Saturday, November 5, 2022 8:23 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think the bigger thing was the twitter post which came off as less of a “slice of like” thing and more as a demonstrative gesture

tbf if youre going to sleep on the floor you better make sure the boss knows

Twitter used to be more fun before half the tweets were about Twitter.

same applies to ilx these days. it's all twitter all hours

Fair point.

at least on a forum you can just not click on the threads discussing something rather than having it interleaved all over your feed

So good

Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022

Remember:

Elon Musk does not have a Twitter account, anyone who claims to be the "real" Elon Musk is a fraud.

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 30, 2009

same applies to ilx these days. it's all twitter all hours

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 7 November 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Here is a tik tok for you.

pic.twitter.com/UGXOunqA1C

— xooset (@xooset) November 4, 2022

And every August we call for the army to be loosed on rioters, just like 2011! https://t.co/sKbHAyC8L7

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) November 7, 2022

Mastodon seems to completely misunderstand the value-proposition of Twitter - a global audience, people to yell at, people to yell at you. Livejournal didn’t get a moron to buy it for $44bn.

Mastodon is more like a message board where you can engage in self-promotion?

Is the What's Happening bit of Twitter curated rather than automated?

Mine currently has 'live' England beating New Zealand in the T20 World Cup, a match that finished almost a week ago

What's Happening will usually show me the same story for a week or so. Not sure what the point of it is.

It was curated. I expect the people doing it were laid off.

Curated pretty awfully. It was invariably:
* Fans wish [vanishingly obscure celebrity] happy birthday!
* [Newsworthy event which happened 6 days ago]
* [Piece of shit magazine does puff piece on dipshit]

I think the celebrity birthdays were meaningful to millions of English-speaking South Asians.

The ones I saw were unlikely to fall into that category.

Musk spent 44Billion and I can still Block him... lol... I'll probably get Banned for that Tweet.

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) November 7, 2022

I know nothing about this thread is really surprising, but it did kinda hammer home to me that I just don't want Elon having his hands on that much info. I deleted the app from my phone and deleted my personal account (which I basically never used anyway). Still have a professional account that I can use from the website, but it felt good to pull back just a little.

With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter.

🧵

— Steve Krenzel (@stevekrenzel) November 7, 2022

Was classique. May be dudded. Only manageable for me via Tweetdeck.

Also, hello again.

I finally deleted the app from my phone today. I asked myself, what would I do if Trump bought Twitter? And that made the choice even easier.

https://www.platformer.news/p/musk-discusses-putting-all-of-twitter

Lots of good stuff in here, including musings about paywalling the whole site, but this is my favorite.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understand the macro environment we are operating in."

He told his new employees that they should listen to his podcast. Amazing.

honestly thats grounds for mob justice

Looool

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user per month in the United States by making that change, sources said. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.

Unable to change your Twitter display name like @evacide? Seeing weird manual RTs? Replies not loading? Twitter is breaking. For @techreview, I spoke to an engineer still employed about how the platform is failing - not with a bang, but with a whimper https://t.co/WST1QKQMba

— Chris Stokel-Walker ~ @sto✧✧✧@info✧✧✧.excha✧✧✧ (@stokel) November 8, 2022

One thing that interests me, is how difficult it is to maintain a service as superficially simple as Twitter at scale. I feel like I could probably write out its basic features quite quickly and simply on a single piece of paper (at least as regards users - I realise the advertising side is more complex). I know that scalability is the issue, but as someone who isn't an IT professional, that's all somewhat shrouded in mystery for me.

The Onion went on a tear in the last 12 hours and then this happened pic.twitter.com/SkDgYmpiB3

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) November 8, 2022

It might turn ok in the end.

Emma Kennedy has had her Twitter account suspended after being mistaken for parody. pic.twitter.com/OnQEqU2Apn

— Jon Mao (Not Parody) (@JonMao___) November 7, 2022

the system works

One thing that interests me, is how difficult it is to maintain a service as superficially simple as Twitter at scale. I feel like I could probably write out its basic features quite quickly and simply on a single piece of paper (at least as regards users - I realise the advertising side is more complex). I know that scalability is the issue, but as someone who isn't an IT professional, that's all somewhat shrouded in mystery for me.

― Alba, Tuesday, November 8, 2022 5:31 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

basically its just hard cause millions of computers both servers where the data is stored and most of the computation happens and users phones or whatever have to communicate and remain synchronized "in real time", and twitters been around for a while so the way all that happens isnt as ideal as if you were to build it new today, but yeah it is crazy how hard it is, computers are bad