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.
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.