First Twitter was going to crash in a week, then it was everyone would flee to Mastodon, now it’s that all the advertisers would leave.
Maybe Twitter really didn’t need 7500 people, and maybe having more voices speak is a good thing (there is always block button), and maybe advertisers won’t flee forever. That seems more likely to me than Twitter imploding.
Was it? I read a lot of comments saying that mass-firing people is going to cause immediate degradation in some areas like content moderation (which we have seen) and eventual unpredictable failures in others. If you saw people predicting a sudden crash I'd take their opinion with a pinch of salt in the future, sounds like quite a reactionary take.
> then it was everyone would flee to Mastodon
Well some people have been trying out Mastodon, some have been tinkering with Tumblr or Instagram, and some communities have started to solidify around discord servers and other places. One near-universal thing I've seen is more popular accounts being very vocal about sharing their links to other services with the aim of making Twitter non-essential - so if it goes down, or they'd rather leave then they could do so without starting completely from scratch.
> now it’s that all the advertisers would leave.
To be fair it sounds like a lot of them have, prompting this very letter ...
> Maybe Twitter really didn’t need 7500 people
Maybe. It remains to be seen whether axing so many so suddenly was survivable in the long-term financially or operationally, though.
Yeah I've no idea how Twitter works or what kind of fires they have to put out on a day-to-day basis, or what other things grow - so I wouldn't dare to make any rash predictions like that. My thinking is that even if Twitter had double the headcount they needed, it'd be really tough to axe that many people without firing or turn away the people needed to put out those fires.
And yeah if you weren't a Twitter user before, you're probably not signing up at this moment in time :)
Also I've heard stories by some pretty prominent Twitter users who just left the platform and feel like their time on there has mostly been a waste of their live and won't be going back.
Maybe people just don't need another "online community"
According to 10-K filings, Doordash went from 3,886 to over 8,600 employees in calendar year 2021 (!!!). While the global macroeconomic situation is certainly fragile right now, the current trend towards corporate-tech layoffs needs to be viewed through this lens. Most public tech companies hired a truly ludicrous number of people in 2021, and the 2022 layoff season is more of a market rebalancing than an overall market shrinkage.
Obviously something is going on, but there's not a secret info line that big companies are into. Interest rates are up, it's harder to get easy money to expand. Some companies are going to spend less money on new software, and lots of companies are trying to reduce costs because it feels like we will have a recession. At the same time, there are lots of jobs, and out of the tech world people are getting raises for hourly work, and they still can't hire enough people. $20/hour at my local mcdonalds. I am still get random job and interview requests on linked in. If you are an experienced engineer there are plenty of jobs. Google, Amazon etc has done some layoffs but they grew a lot the last 2 years. Seems like plenty of smaller companies are hiring.
I've dipped into Twitter trending topics a couple times in the last week. Each day it was 100% Alt right, Crypto, an error (like a sentence fragment), or world cup news for top 20 topics. That looks like a disaster to me.
If Twitter was a new app just launched, I would think it was a seriously sketchy back alley and not a town square.
Twitter is still OK for users that have been there for a while and built up a network of good accounts to follow. It's probably a much worse experience for brand-new users.
Twitter was a second tier advertising destination before there was any inkling of a Musk deal, and advertisers started leaving before the deal closed when he was trying to get out of it. The biggest advertising firms in the world are advising their clients to leave.
Why would they come back? Musk is the Donald Trump of tech - plenty of devoted fans, but not someone brands want to associate themselves with. Even if he wanted to, it doesn't seem that Musk can stop impulsively tweeting controversial things.
Claims that were classified as COVID misinformation include:
- surgical masks don't work against aerosol viruses
- lockdowns and curfews will not stop covid
- natural immunity due to prior infection is more effective
- mRNA shots don't stop transmission
- mRNA shots don't stop infection
- mRNA shots cause myocarditis
One by one these have been revealed as true, with naysayers looking like ass-covering idiots, or worse, paid shills for big pharma.
If at this point you still have any faith left in the biomedical establishment, the one who doesn't belong on Twitter is you, because you will hysterically fall for the next big thing just the same.
Claims (2, 4, 5, 6) are very weak because you are making them absolutes (e.g. "don't stop"). By themselves, these 4 claims don't tell us what our plan of action should be. They become misinformation when they are used as recommondations because they are missing so much context.
For example, claim (6) about myocarditis is usually used to say that vaccines are dangerous and should be avoided. This is a wrongheaded examination of the risks:
> Given that >90% of cases of myocarditis will completely recover, that means in young men the vaccines prevent six deaths per million doses while causing <4 cases of myocarditis that have less than complete recovery. In all other groups the results are much more dramatic, saving hundreds of lives for every case of myocarditis (including the mild cases).
> We also have to keep in mind that COVID-19 infection itself causes myocarditis. ... That’s 1,500 cases of myocarditis per million COVID-19 infections, vs 40 per million in the high-risk group of young men from mRNA vaccines, and 1-2 per million doses in lower risk groups. The risk is literally 1-2 orders of magnitude (10-100x) greater from getting infected than from the vaccine.
P.S. Claim (3) misses the entire point? The point of vaccines is to not get as sick and possibly avoid getting sick altogether. "Natural immunity" requires you to have a "prior infection" as you say.
Here's another absolute claim: there will be herd immunity at 70% vaccinated. There will be no fourth wave. 100% safe and effective. etc. etc. THAT is the language that was used to justify recommendations, and that was the real misinformation. Which you couldn't question at the time, until months later, when it turned out to be a lie.
An intramuscular shot cannot create a targeted immune response in the mucus membranes of the airways. This was known, and ignored, making the idea of getting a shot to protect grandma a complete lie.
The goal posts have moved so much that even the word vaccine was redefined, thus tainting the concept and creating a ton of justified skepticism. Like really, do you not realize how ridiculous you sound to ordinary people, trying to rule lawyer your way past this elephant in the room?
The point about myocarditis remains that informed consent should have been asked for, and that they shouldn't have authorized an emergency medicine when due diligence wasn't done. Quite frankly, I don't believe covid is more dangerous than the jab. I don't believe we live in an environment atm where the truth is being investigated objectively. And this is an entirely reasonable belief, given the undeniable corruption and lies.
Like, you know how it takes 2 weeks after your shot before you count as vaccinated? Guess which category vaccine injuries in the first two weeks were attributed to in many cases... that is the level intellectual honesty we're dealing with here. It's detestable.
As for natural immunity: the point here is that forcing people with prior exposure to get jabbed anyway was immoral and unnecessary. This is the _very important_ point you are missing. And you think you're making sense!
Human rights were violated, in the name of shoddy science, endorsed by people who are much more eager to dunk on the rubes and appear sophisticated, than actually establishing reasonable and objective standards.
Go sit in shame, and stfu. Nobody wants to hear it.
Thanks, these are much stronger claims, plus they include recommendations. This basically confirmed what I thought your larger goals were.
> I don't believe covid is more dangerous than the jab.
A million EU residents died of covid in 2 years. Even ignoring the cause of death, ~500k more EU residents died in 2020 than usual, predating the roll-out of the vaccines. (link will only plot individual countries, not the EU total).
Twitter definitely took measures to prevent network outages. I can go through my timeline within 10 minutes; after that, I'm seeing posts from the day before. This was impossible pre-Musk; the timeline just went on forever.
AFAIK, most of the people I follow are still tweeting; I just don't see as many now.
The ideologically driven hyperventilating over Twitter is so ridiculous.
Pre-2015 Twitter wasn't the apocalypse before all the content moderation policies were rushed in as a response to widespread narrative that a bunch of people in swing states changed their votes because of Russian accounts.
It's not the apocalypse now. You can block hateful trolls anytime you want.
At the end of the day, there's a chunk of the US population who believes that they are much, much smarter than most of their countrymen, and that their unique ability to identify misinformation isn't shared by these buffoons in swing states who don't vote the way they want them to. There's a huge swathe of people like that in the software industry.
> Maybe Twitter really didn’t need 7500 people, and maybe having more voices speak is a good thing (there is always block button), and maybe advertisers won’t flee forever. That seems more likely to me than Twitter imploding.
Exactly. 7,500 is far too much to run a site like Twitter which at the time, it was already running itself to the ground. But it seems just like the so-called mass advertiser migration from Facebook, that never happened will be no different with Twitter despite the unusual levels of vacuous claims of Twitter's immediate 'imploding', which that has been greatly exaggerated by very emotionally charged people.
Twitter was already dead. Twitter 2.0 on the other hand seems more alive than ever, and I'm laughing at both the Twitter chaos and those pretending to leave Twitter whilst keeping their accounts.
Why are remaining workers asked to be hardcore and do long days if there is nothing to do?
These are the best of the best, so they should probably get their work done really fast and leave early.
That was the talking point last week and the week before. You need to get up to speed with the latest outrage narrative. Don't worry about following up on any of it. There will always be a new one ready to go. Writing Elon articles is like the 'easy button' of mainstream media. It will always generate clicks which is a great way to advance your career as a professional 'content creator'. Just focus on this while the rest of the uninteresting world goes under reported.
Maybe Twitter really didn’t need 7500 people, and maybe having more voices speak is a good thing (there is always block button), and maybe advertisers won’t flee forever. That seems more likely to me than Twitter imploding.