Spammers have money. For them it's merely a cost of doing business and they'll spam as long as there's positive ROI. For something like politically-motivated disinfo on Twitter there are millions of dollars bankrolled.
OTOH any non-zero cost is off-putting for regular users and stifles growth of services. Twitter has upset its top users by trying to change $8!
Then there are flash loans that let you have any amount of wealth in the web3 world for only a tiny fraction of the price. It keeps popping "DeFi" services that naively assumed nobody would risk a fortune to attack them, but there's a fortune-for-hire service!
Anyway, the real-world web has used phone numbers as proof of small amount of money. There are CC checks for bigger amounts. Then there's web of trust which is a pre-web3 word for "staking", except using reputation instead of Monopoly money. Mastodon instances for example ban other instances from federation if they don't police spam/abuse enough, so every server admin is motivated to fight it locally, while the system as a whole remains decentralised.
Everyone on the internet knows how to run Twitter better than the richest man on earth who revolutionized both the electric car and private space industries. I wish I could invest in Twitter now but I’ll wait for the cryptocurrency launch.
Your sarcastic implication being that being good at managing car and space companies make him good at managing a social media company? Not only that, good enough to be better at it than his predecessor? Not only that, he's better at it within days of arriving?
Optimizing a factory is indeed quite a lot like optimizing cloud infrastructure. Different domains but there is a lot of overlapping skill set and having developed that from zero scaling Tesla is exactly the experience that would make an executive good at reducing costs and bringing Twitter to profitability.
Building cars is the place where modern efficiency practices were developed. (Much of it started in post war Japan with American auto industry help, the fusion of cultures developed something quite useful)
To be fair, Jack Dorsey rolled over his ownership into the new structure. There are few people who know twitter, it’s problems, and potential than him.
When things start getting really bad you make retention bonuses widespread. Was at a collapsing company and we all got a years salary paid quarterly for staying, but if you left before a year had to pay it back. Everyone was pleased.
No 25% every quarter. Essentially doubled our salaries to stay a year. Was a very profitable business being operated with a skeleton crew and we were burning out, there was no other option.
It’s like HN discounts all his other successes and can’t believe he can attract high performing employees. He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting so it’s not a stretch to think he can flip Twitter back to an IPO quickly.
Its not luke hyperloop and the boring comosny were major failures and he was late for every deadline he has ever set.
Past performance does indicate future success. Nothing about this twitter story, from waving due dilligence, to trying to pull of a signed deal, to treatnent of employees, indicates competent management
> He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting
Right but that isn't the problem here, Twitter already solved that. What they haven't been able to do is make a short-form blog posting service that's profitable. Everything Musk has announced so far suggests he doesn't really understand how to change that.
he is going to change ut from unprofitable to disasterous. Have you seen the interest payment that must be serviced on that loan? The whole enterprise is dead, you just dont know it yet
Culture presents much harder problems than science when it comes to social media. Though I agree it’s not a stretch to think he can add Twitter to his successes.
Bigco software engineering has been quite chill / slack-off for some time. Rude awakening for a lot of devs if they have been resting on their laurels.
It might be possible to train yourself differently. Since having kids my sleep is much more like a control knob - I can go more days without it before needing a recharge.
If you are a highly skilled technologist you will not have any issue finding a new job. If you are greatly bothered by the changes at Twitter and the new ownership it is almost certainly for the best that you leave and do something else. I don't see why someone skilled enough to work at Twitter would desperately hang on working for someone you can't stand to try and get some severance. Life isn't fair and this is the free market, and you are earning Big Buck$, dust off the resume and join a new company. Life is too short to live like that.
I don't know if you know this or not, but often people's first job is in fact at a company. Perhaps even Twitter, so they may not have gone through a wave of layoffs before and don't know their rights or have connected to coworkers outside of work-specific communications.
Either they pay or you can sue, publicly complain damaging their reputation and so on. That's why you never quit in this cases, but make sure that everybody knows that your BFF is a lawyer.
All sides of the political spectrum do this but it’s hilarious to me the “The 1950’s were amazing and we had high income taxes!” and ignore all the other things - like the entire world was bombed to shit and the seeds of stagflation were planted then.
Well, the entire rest of the industrialized world was bombed to shit and the US was not only untouched but also had been ramping up production as much as possible for 5 years. It's pretty much an ideal situation for a large economy when all of your competitors have destroyed each other and now everyone has to look to buy their rebuilding supplies from you.
Not op, I’d have to look. Generally though the seeds of a downturn don’t happen then, they happen during the boom times, when everything seems great.
It’s the biggest issue I have with Keynesian school of thought: the answer to get out of a downturn is to gov spend more, but it ignores what happens in the boom times (in which gov also spends more these days). Meanwhile growth, even in good times, has been slowing. Used to be 3-4%/year 30 years ago, more like 1-2% now. And still the calls are for spending more. I don’t know when exactly we’ll stop growing altogether, could be 100 years from now, but with all the gov spending, we sure want to find out!
Oh man remember when Meta / Facebook was a monopoly and we had to do everything in our power to stop them? And now their stock is down 75% in the last 12 months and they are getting beaten up by competitors? And without any government intervention! It's almost like the world is always dynamic and who is on top today isn't on top tomorrow...
Facebook active users have increased so their influence is only increasing.
But I disagree that Facebook is a monopoly -- their market is advertising and there is still plenty of active competition in the online advertising marketplace.
