Twitter C/D

Imagine no more. This is my life now. https://t.co/k5QfAm8yuG pic.twitter.com/e7ECCM2NUD

— Christopher J. Beale (@realchrisjbeale) July 29, 2023

i don't have an account, never had an account, and now i can't read threads from a web browser anymore = dud

― budo jeru, Monday, July 31, 2023 3:24 PM (six minutes ago)

deleted mine, but yeah lol I have to stop clicking on this thread

TS: Blaze your glory vs. Be best

the woke mob won again

The X sign has been taken down from the Twitter HQ pic.twitter.com/b6ijJIIvjx

— Dexerto (@Dexerto) July 31, 2023

They should have set it on fire.

Jesus, this is exhausting.

FWIW "blaze your glory" is an anagram of "regularly boozy"

removing this app from my phone right up there with the day i finally go around to clearing Songs of Innocence out of my music library - recommended!

Wait, can we talk about that white genocide tweet more? Like, that should be a big deal? Serious fascist shit.

yeah its bad

it's one of his bad ones

read some thing (a tweet maybe lol) a while ago theorizing that the end of apartheid and subsequent societal shift profoundly disturbed a young musk provoking his move to america and that seeing the blm protests of 2021 reminded him of that catalyzing his right wing radicalization

“White Genocide” for these creeps is when a nonwhite person gets into university.

Tucker used to talk about white genocide in South Africa on the regular

geez whatever happened to that guy I haven't thought about him in months

removing this app from my phone right up there with the day i finally go around to clearing Songs of Innocence out of my music library - recommended!

― meat and two vdgg (emsworth), Monday, 31 July 2023 21:26 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

What did David Axelrod do to deserve this?

geez whatever happened to that guy I haven't thought about him in months

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2Zp5MPWEAAy676?format=webp&name=medium

it's twitter boycott day today. but nobody mentioned a timezone...

Why hasn't it been twitter boycott day since last October? That's when I peaced.

Ideas exploding from the mind of young Elon:

“Hey what if I bought Walmart and changed the name to Balls Mart?”

“What if I bought Pizza Hut and changed the name to Greasy Butt?”

“My name’s not Elon, it’s just X.”

his kid is called X. he'd be X Sr.

mr x sr sir here are the new analytics for x.com im afraid its not good

*elon making dolphin noises*

My daughter showed me her phone yesterday and complained that her twitter app had become X. I asked her why she even had twitter, and she said she needed it to follow Harry Styles. But after a quick review of Musk's growing assholery, including (apparently) bringing back Kanye, she finally bit the bullet and just deleted the app. I told her she's better off without it, and that Harry would understand.

geez whatever happened to that guy I haven't thought about him in months

― frogbs, Monday, July 31, 2023 9:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it really is wild how much power television still has, even in this media age. like these losers really start thinking it's them and people will follow them anywhere they go.

lol tucker was so high on his own supply trying to get a famously powerful and vindictive fox exec fired

‼️ After 14 years, and with 73.8K followers, this account is closing for now. Twitter keeps breaking something in the API that prevents Mr Pepys from posting. I change it back, and they break it again. Phil. ‼️https://t.co/AR1oW2Fruq

— Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys) August 1, 2023

Man, poor Pepys. It all starts with a kidney stone and ends with the death of twitter.

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company.

I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in… pic.twitter.com/bw7CHhk0Xg

— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) July 26, 2023

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/034/711/Screen_Shot_2020-07-24_at_11.33.38_AM.jpg

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.

lol go off person who got fired

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny.

surprisingly down to earth!

I'd be interested in caek's take on her description of pre-Elon corporate culture. Doesn't sound too surprising really, for a place that grew as fast as it did.

xp
amazingly lifelike!

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.

all true. all SOP at big tech. not unique to twitter, even in degree.

she's using "bespoke" like it's a dirty word, which reflects a naive startup understanding of how to build a service at that scale (you can't rent it from AWS).

It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

first part not true. second part true.

and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste

i don't know what she means by "soft" (i can guess) but "entitled" was true at every big tech company at the time she and i were at twitter. it was a seller's market for tech workers. but it was probably truer at twitter than elsewhere. certainly more than anywhere else i've worked.

this simply sounds like a description of any large company, tech or no.

i guess people expect these problems to be rarer at tech companies for whatever reason ("disruption", "agile", relatively young, etc.). they're not.

resisting them is part of what you're being paid for by a big slow company like twitter when it tries to absorb a startup like hers. being genuinely surprised by them (which she may or may not be) seems naive though.

Unless you count my experience working at a Burger King franchise during and after high school (LOL), I have never worked in or for a large corporation. Based on what I hear from my friends who do, what she says about turf wars sounds right. Some of these folks spend much or most of their time defending their perceived territory (and attending unproductive meetings).

I had an hour-long Zoom call yesterday with a woman who is not in my department, offering me lessons in how to do a thing I will never need to know how to do, and when I asked my direct supervisor why I had to take that call she said "She's just like this, so we humor her."

like, 'gets harder to fire people', yeah, because larger companies get more worried about bias and discrimination claims when this happens, usually after having suffered through lawsuits when they were less careful about things. this is called being a mature company.

and when I asked my direct supervisor why I had to take that call she said "She's just like this, so we humor her."

That is infuriating, and a waste of everyones time. And feeds dickheads like that with false confidence!

And feeds dickheads . . . with false confidence!

This is, like, what most businesses spend half their time doing.

Which reminds me of this which I learned about yesterday, and is perfect (and perfectly horrifying)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair?wprov=sfla1

large entities are afraid of change because even if the status quo is melting, abrupt changes could clear the status quo entirely, including the bits that actually make your product a product?

scope is the hardest part to tackle, because focused teams with clear accountability and goals can still get stuff done and all of the people crawford’s being dismissive of have some function, and any small team’s leadership is there to identify project needs and coordinate with those other groups to prioritize and deliver the functionality your focused project needs.

kind of blows up if the management of other groups doesn’t prioritize your work, or if they’re hesitant to change things because of that institutional inertia

caek’s otm with the “bespoke” interpretation. my impression is that nearly any large org can make everything cleaner by swapping out and modernizing parts of their software stack, especially as things they developed in-house end up having off the shelf alternatives. many of those alternatives exist because people at twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. developed things in-house (bespoke!) that weren’t bound to specific company needs, were then open sourced or spun off, and everyone can build off of what’s now institutional knowledge. you also gain the ability to onboard new people and technologies faster when there’s a more common set of tools.
maybe twitter’s stack needs a little updating but shitting on the very process that created the tools you’ll move to is asinine and I’d assume her prior company relied on common components

they shouldve used wordpress

no one ever lost their job for picking wordpress

what if you renamed it to xpress

AdBlock browser worked on Twitter ads for like a day or two, now seeing ads again :(

more grist for this stupid mill: logging into tweetdeck and its called "XPro" now, my god what in the name of winamp skins and netscape navigator is this

I'm taking down my business account. I never posted much on it anyway, mostly used it to follow people. Sometimes nice when somebody tags us or something, but it's not a big part of our self-promotion or anything. But now I just don't even want to be affiliated. I've created a burner account to keep following politicos and so forth but I don't even want to be there in any official capacity. It's too dumb and gross.