Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.
While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers".
I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.
Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created? I’ve seen no upside to employees offered, only brutal management and benefit reduction with a promise of hard work for less.
Musk attracts engineers by selling a vision. Reusable rockets to make humanity an interstellar species. Electric vehicles to free humanity from fossil fuels. Humanoid robots. Neuralink. And on it goes.
For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]
That might not be your cup of tea, or you might believe Musk is too petulant a leader to bring that vision to fruition. But it is an aspiration that will make some people excited and willing to put in the hard work Musk is demanding.
>For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence".
Unless you make fun of the owner, that gets you banned ASAP.
Also, I don't think most people associate a massive increase in hate speech and harassment with a healthy town square. Threatening paying customers who show any reticence is an "interesting" way to grow a business. It's early still, but this has basically been the vision pitch so far.
> For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]
Musk seems like one of the people least capable on earth of having a debate in a healthy manner.
> a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner
Musk says a lot of things, some serious and others 100% trolling, and we have a hard time knowing how serious he is for any of them. Even as he’s addressing the main customers of his company, given his past and present behavior, we can’t take your quote at face value and assume any of it is meaningful (he’s saying that while reducing the moderation staff…)
My definition of “competent engineer” includes reading between the lines and making an effort to understand what is actually required for a job to be done. I don’t see any competent engineer joining on publicly shared empty promises.
But that's not remotely as inspiring a vision as the others. Nor is it new, or is he presenting Twitter or himself as the best parties to accomplish this. People who care about this vision are running their own forums and fediverse servers.
>Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created?
same reason people worked for id software or other companies with grueling cultures. Because working with people who are excited about what they do and who are fiercely loyal is great. It's not even really about Musk, it's what has always drawn people to hard work.
For Tesla or SpaceX, it's obvious what the payoff for the burnout is. You get to pull off things that have never been done before, which missions that matter to humanity.
With Twitter...? So, maybe they copy TikTok and Youtube and some crypto payments system. Who cares?
Why would it be any different from his other companies? I wouldn't apply, but if some people are willing to work at Tesla, surely some are also willing to work at Musk-Twitter?
Because Twitter isn’t building space ships or changing transportation, and the expected culture and benefits of a software media company vs manufacturing company are very different.
> What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade?
They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine.
Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.
Clubhouse lost its shine on its own. It simply didn’t scale on a social level and became a cesspool of crypto scams and conspiracy theorists looking for marks.
Both things can be true at the same time. I dropped of CH because the synchronicity was too much for me. But apparently other people still use Twitter spaces.
They launched the predecessor to the current hottest social media app but killed it before it could gain any popularity. So that’s a new way to shoot yourself in the foot.
That is kind of the opposite of innovating, no? The idea that the company is depending on prior innovation? Unless you are saying the updates contain innovation.
Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.
> an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi
Could you give me an example from the USA?
> your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near]
The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.
> Twitter does content moderation.
Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts.
To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.
> It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing.
Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse, as a brand that’s mostly tried to avoid Nazi connections over the last 70-odd years?
> They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends.
Two points here:
First, I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it. As a corporate money-making entity, Twitter is concerned about maximizing its user base, and if blocking the neo-nazi means 3 other people stay on the platform, by golly that’s the move Twitter Inc the business will make. It turns out speech is sometimes zero-sun or worse: one person’s instance of free speech makes another person feel like their life is in danger.
Second, Twitter’s customer is not you, nor the public, nor democracy. Twitter’s customer is Ford, and if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things like LGBTQ rights and immigration, at least at a surface level, are better for their global brand than not, so Twitter’s content moderation strategy will reflect that. Most of the people complaining about Twitter’s content moderation strategy were already mad at Cheerios for running ads celebrating gay marriage, so it‘s hard to say they’ve really missed the mark here.
Again, Twitter is an advertising company whose supply is “users”, and they need the maximal supply of palatable (read: users without paired lightning bolts in their bio) users for their customers, Advertisers. That’s what the platform is, that’s what their business is, and that’s who they’re moderating content for.
> Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse
Vastly better. Because it's not a choice they made but a choice the user made. Someone reading a nazi blog won't be upset and someone not reading about nazis won't see the ad run concurrently. You'd have to go looking to create this problem situation and then screenshot it for evidence because it wouldn't show up for normal people using the system.
> I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it
I think most people would be happy that nazis and child-abuse photos would be blocked, but that most people don't know Twitter seemed to put more time into political censorship. If was easier for a feminist to get banned from twitter for saying women need sex-based spaces than for the accounts sending death threats to the feminist for saying it. Child-sex abuse materials and accounts trading them remained for months, if not years.
> if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things
Not most by far. Some brands have decided to play very virtue-forward, most just made sure they cut out unintentional offense. No need to show your truck driven to a Redskins game when you could show it to a Huskies game.
>> To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views
> Advertisers. that’s who they’re moderating content for
No, they didn't block the Hunter Biden laptop story because of advertiser pressure. They've been mixing their own personal views with what the advertisers supposedly want.
Besides, what I'm talking about would serve advertisers just as well as now. I'm not saying Twitter shouldn't moderate, just that users and advertisers would both be better served with a configurable categorizing system where they (and you if you choose, or with a public blocklist) can assign scores based on nazi words and dogwhistles, etc, and users can choose to block that content or not.
Advertisers would end up with better categorized posts because Twitter and the users would be collaborating on this, not at odds like now, and they could block more effectively; not just on whatever Twitter considers ad-worthy today but with their own list of never-show keywords as well. And users would finally end up with something trustworthy because instead of "bad content" being deleted it would simply be hidden - shadow banned - and available to be audited.
Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?
I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to pay that well...
Also the mission. If I didn't have a great gig right now, I would absolutely join Twitter, just for the opportunity to add new features and prove that the old Twitter was sorely underperforming and that Twitter can be a force for free speech, which I believe in an absolute right.
Elon's companies aren't known to pay particularly well. I got an offer at one of his companies that was such an insane lowball it was hard to take seriously.
>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.
> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats"
This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?
(Internet) companies mad-hired because they thought COVID permanently accelerated the demand shift to online from brick-and-mortar. It turned out it wasn't a new baseline after all.
Reading generously, I would say you could interpret that statement more like: "Now that we know it is possible to innovate with an asynchronous workforce, and most people want to work that way, it will be extremely difficult for us to gather the same quality of individuals in one place to innovate if we decide we need their butts to be in seats."
Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals figured out how to game equity compensation with their Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have had some big leaps).
A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.
>What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place.
Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock.
Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.
the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.
> Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward.
It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate.
The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.
>It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient.
Is it though?
Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.
I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees.
Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think.
What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do.
All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early?
Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.