Your thoughts on Elon musk?

The only reason I am glad Elon might change things, is because I don't like the crowd that are crying the most about Elon. It's entirely petty, I suppose. lol

Oh, he'll be changing things. By ultimately removing Twitter from the social media sphere

I’m assuming he and his “team” have had months to examine alleged redundancies.
I have friends at Twitter. They say the place has been toxic for years. Now it’s up to 11.
As far as takeovers go, the nuts and bolts of it aren’t that unusual. How this is being executed is another story. I’ve spent some time in startups and fortune 250 corps, slashing C level and general workforce is par for the course. I’m not saying any of his actions are right, especially how he’s gone about it, but it’s not that surprising.
My 2 friends at Twitter, both taking the package. They’re young enough and talented enough to get 3 months off and grab another gig. Can’t say the same for everyone there.

Quote from: MaNaeSWolf on November 18, 2022, 08:05:58 AM

Twitter is a dead simple site.

......

They need probably around 300 Engineers. An accounting department of about 50 people. And a massive team of content and PR moderation. 2000 people is a LOT of people to run a frikken website that does so little.

This is all probably true. So why has he paid $44B for it?

He had to, didn't he? He tried to get out of it, but they wouldn't let him.

He had to, didn't he? He tried to get out of it, but they wouldn't let him.

No, he didn't have to.  He made a legally binding offer of $44B for the company  - nobody forced him into that.

Projected on the Twitter HQ building...

Projected on the Twitter HQ building...

Free speech!

Quote from: Space Cowgirl on November 18, 2022, 09:58:14 AM

He had to, didn't he? He tried to get out of it, but they wouldn't let him.

No, he didn't have to.  He made a legally binding offer of $44B for the company  - nobody forced him into that.

You asked why he paid $44B for the company, not why he made the offer in the first place!

I would also like to know what made him think Twitter was worth that much. I don't think it was a secret that Twitter was bleeding millions.

Twitter is a dead simple site.

Discord, which is VASTLY more feature rich has an entire team of 750 people

YouTube has 2800 people

Reddit has 700

TikTok 700

WTF is twitter doing with 7500 people?

How is it in anyway conceivable that they have more people than YouTube working on a app that allows people to send short messages?

How many engineers are there tunning TFES? 1000? 10 000? Heck, we can even send messages longer than 300 characters here?

They need probably around 300 Engineers. An accounting department of about 50 people. And a massive team of content and PR moderation. 2000 people is a LOT of people to run a frikken website that does so little.

It does seem a little high in comparison.  I can only speculate.  But from the news I see that these layoffs and ultimatums have deeply cut into their technical staff.  If Elon was just trying to fire all the professional SJWs I think he'd probably go out of his way to shield the people that actually keep the place running.

https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025

Obviously, a 50% cut is hard but my org was cut at 85%+ on the first round. (An admitted mistake by leadership when they were trying to retain the survivors) I was the last one standing in multiple large slack rooms and JIRA boards. The office was depressing.

Nevertheless myself and others were banding together, triaging services, updating on-call, literally saying to my wife on Tuesday “I’ll give it my best shot what do I have to lose?”. Then Wednesday offered a clean exit and 80% of the remaining were gone. 3/75 engineers stayed.

That's about what I would have expected.

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-elon-musk-half-working-2022-11

I was wrong to ever doubt Elon for buying twitter.  This is amazing.  This is the best gift he could ever have given humanity.  We're witnessing a 44 billion dollar bonfire.  It's performance art on a scale that we've never seen before.  Perhaps Elon was so troubled by the evils of capitalism that he decided to destroy an amount of wealth greater than the market cap of Honda.

Elon used to be synonymous with cool. Apparently he still thinks that's the case. Nope!

When was that?

As for why he paid $44 billion, probably because he is used to company stock being based upon hype, and needed to put in an offer high enough to have them say yes.

He's really redefining his meme from when he walked in holding a sink.

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1593419658962604032?s=20&t=7qzaevXWYjL3CV6fXQTxkQ

How can one man cause so much harm and so much chaos to so many people globally in the space of a few weeks? How? How??

This guy has a show on MSNBC and he's crying about Twitter. None of the overwrought reaction from journalists makes any sense.

This is all probably true. So why has he paid $44B for it?

He bought 238 million users. $185 per user does seem a bit high.
And I honestly dont know why he bought it. Id much rather have him spend his money on more space stuff.

But I still find this interesting that everyone is bitching that Elon is breaking Twitter, yet nothing is breaking.
For me as a twitter user, the only thing that has changed is that the amount of people saying "ITS ALL OVER FOLKS" has increased. But functionally, literally nothing is changing.

Quote from: JimmyTheLobster on November 18, 2022, 08:28:29 AM

This is all probably true. So why has he paid $44B for it?

He bought 238 million users. $185 per user does seem a bit high.
And I honestly dont know why he bought it. Id much rather have him spend his money on more space stuff.

But I still find this interesting that everyone is bitching that Elon is breaking Twitter, yet nothing is breaking.
For me as a twitter user, the only thing that has changed is that the amount of people saying "ITS ALL OVER FOLKS" has increased. But functionally, literally nothing is changing.

Twitter invested a lot of time and money training staff to which Elon gave no F's for and fired. Almost entire engineering teams are gone. Elon brags 'the best people are left' but if in a team of 80, 3 are left inside a fortnight - that's a lot of brain drain gone and the ones behind can not pull the weight of those that left.

Sure, on the surface level you may not notice something broke - but failures can cascade and with so few left, even 'the best' won't be able to keep up. Those that are left will no doubt be expected to compensate (been in a workplace like that before) which will only crush work ethic further

I'm guessing it's not 'the best' have chosen to stay, but those that aren't confident about job prospects if they walk. Perhaps the worst remained lol

The best may have left, confident their skills can net them a job elsewhere

I suggest reading what some of the fired engineers are saying. A lot of their jobs weren't just tokenistic. Also pretty shit and dirty of Elon to publicly fire people (on twitter no less) because they (expert in their field) disagreed with Elon about how Twitter works.

Elon is a major douche bag with the thinnest skin - no question. Not sure why you believe Twitter will sail on almost as if nothing happened. It's a 'for profit' company that has been bleeding millions and now runs on less than a skeleton staff to maintain it and an irreversible and catastrophic brain drain. Zero handover.

Quote from: Wolvaccine on November 18, 2022, 04:28:46 AM

Elon used to be synonymous with cool. Apparently he still thinks that's the case. Nope!

When was that?

As for why he paid $44 billion, probably because he is used to company stock being based upon hype, and needed to put in an offer high enough to have them say yes.

Years and years ago. When he was just known for Tesla and SpaceX. The public thought much more warmly of him (perhaps those that knew him always knew he was a dickhead).

But I think the mask started to fall off when he accused the Thai cave rescuer of being a pedo. Then he started to interject in politics more and now he looks nothing but a spoiled man child who thinks reposting memes from the shittiest corner of the web is funny.

Then he comes up with stupid and pointless ideas like his 'boring company'. His illiteracy of science amplified with his idea we can 'nuke Mars' to terraform it.

As a CEO or public figure he'd do well to stay neutral on politics and generally STFU most of the time.

But Elon is trapped in a bubble that strokes his ego so he thinks he has mass appeal because he's surrounded himself with people who love to hop on his cock and wont get off. Sure, he has a cult following and many people adore him. Just a shit load more now see him as the petulant man child he really is

Years and years ago. When he was just known for Tesla and SpaceX. The public thought much more warmly of him (perhaps those that knew him always knew he was a dickhead).

But I think the mask started to fall off when he accused the Thai cave rescuer of being a pedo. Then he started to interject in politics more and now he looks nothing but a spoiled man child who thinks reposting memes from the shittiest corner of the web is funny.

Then he comes up with stupid and pointless ideas like his 'boring company'. His illiteracy of science amplified with his idea we can 'nuke Mars' to terraform it.

As a CEO or public figure he'd do well to stay neutral on politics and generally STFU most of the time.

But Elon is trapped in a bubble that strokes his ego so he thinks he has mass appeal because he's surrounded himself with people who love to hop on his cock and wont get off. Sure, he has a cult following and many people adore him. Just a shit load more now see him as the petulant man child he really is

Well if we are just talking about the general public then fair enough.
But I would say plenty of people always thought he wasn't that great.

Elon is a major douche bag with the thinnest skin - no question. Not sure why you believe Twitter will sail on almost as if nothing happened.

I agree with the first point. He is a douche, and it seems as if he is handling the twitter issue badly. Im just not so convinced Twitter will collapse. The user base is where the value lies, and there is no alternative for the user base. Nothing of note has actually broken, and Im not so convinced that twitter is so super complex software that needs thousands of people to run it.
As long as people can complain about twitter, on twitter, the platform is fine. Twitter never had verification badges or any of the crap people are complaining about when it grew to fame. Its CORE business, is allowing people to post short messages to the world. Thats something that a team of 50 can maintain.

But I think the mask started to fall off when he accused the Thai cave rescuer of being a pedo.

Everyone is an asshole. You only realise it when they speak though. I think Musks fall in the public eye was because his companies started to become more self-manageable. Every company goes through stages, and the first stages require hands on deck 24-7 or everything falls apart. Once he had all the right people in place that gave him free time, he got on stupid twitter too much.

But at the end of the day he is just a person. As far as billionaires go, he is not too bad. Calling someone names is hardly the sign of the devil

Quote from: JimmyTheLobster on November 18, 2022, 08:28:29 AM

This is all probably true. So why has he paid $44B for it?

He bought 238 million users. $185 per user does seem a bit high.

Many of which are bots, according to Musk himself.  Though he's stopped talking about that now and just uses the same stats he said were trash when he was trying to get out the deal.

And you don't own those users.  As you said, the tech is simple - they could easily drain away to a competitor.  And very quickly as well - they could easily end up this generations MySpace.

But I still find this interesting that everyone is bitching that Elon is breaking Twitter

Bitching?  Most of us are just there with popcorn.  I hope he does break it, I like the entertainment.

And you don't own those users.  As you said, the tech is simple - they could easily drain away to a competitor.  And very quickly as well - they could easily end up this generations MySpace.

I would say Twitter has the network effect going for it, and quite well.
The competitors are no where near as attractive to lots of groups, because there are far fewer people there.

Quote from: JimmyTheLobster on November 19, 2022, 03:28:41 AM

And you don't own those users.  As you said, the tech is simple - they could easily drain away to a competitor.  And very quickly as well - they could easily end up this generations MySpace.

I would say Twitter has the network effect going for it, and quite well.
The competitors are no where near as attractive to lots of groups, because there are far fewer people there.

This is true.  But the network effect works both ways - if your userbase collapses then it will happen very quickly.  Someone may well do a Facebook to it's MySpace.

Many of which are bots, according to Musk himself.  Though he's stopped talking about that now and just uses the same stats he said were trash when he was trying to get out the deal.

And you don't own those users.  As you said, the tech is simple - they could easily drain away to a competitor.  And very quickly as well - they could easily end up this generations MySpace.

Your not supposed to bitch about the flaws in your own company.

Competitor? Where?

You need users to be a social media company. To get users, you need users to attract the users.
If a competitor is to arise, it will be an established social media company, like tick tock, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. Because they have users. But none of them have stepped up to fill the gap.
For a new social media company to come along, they need to offer something else that other platforms are not offering.
YouTube is video. TikTok, short form video. Instagram, images. Facebook, old people. And twitter, instant community messaging. No other established platform does what twitter does.

Also, can you tell me what user experience has become worse in the last 2 weeks? Because unless there is a decreasing user experiance, Twitter will be fine.

Also, can you tell me what user experience has become worse in the last 2 weeks? Because unless there is a decreasing user experiance, Twitter will be fine.

Several companies stock prices plunged costing billions because of that stupid Twitter blue thing when people pretended to be a company and readers didn't check properly to see it was just a parody

Content moderation was more than just removing posts deemed to be 'wrong think'. You have over 200 million users collectively tweeting over a billion tweets a day. Somebody has to keep the trolls and losers posting wildly inappropriate shit at bay. You'll probably notice a lot more troll accounts, troll farms, spamming, hacking and bad actors stirring shit up etc. To be fair, it was already there, just there is no filter and barely anyone left to put a lid on it.

YouTube incorporates AI which is bullshit as it demonitises, removes and age restricts a lot of videos that are absolutely normal

Some guy talking about chess got the video removed deemed as 'offensive' probably because he talked about black and white. Not sure how people will feel about handing control of the FREE SPEECH to some AI bot for Twitter

Twitter does have competition, it's just not as prolific or ingrained in culture yet

If Elon was smart he'd turn Twitter similar to the Chinese 'Wechat' where you can use it for everything. Order food from a restaurant table, pay with it, video conferencing etc. It's like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Zoom etc all in one

He needs to make Twitter an 'all in one' service rather than just occupy a niche field if he wants to see it make a profit. It will never make profit if it keeps on its current trajectory

But of course, Elon being Elon, treated his staff like dogshit and now has nobody to help him. He might as well start over at this point which kinda defeats the purpose of even buying Twitter to begin with

Quote from: JimmyTheLobster on November 18, 2022, 08:28:29 AM

This is all probably true. So why has he paid $44B for it?

He bought 238 million users. $185 per user does seem a bit high.
And I honestly dont know why he bought it. Id much rather have him spend his money on more space stuff.

But I still find this interesting that everyone is bitching that Elon is breaking Twitter, yet nothing is breaking.
For me as a twitter user, the only thing that has changed is that the amount of people saying "ITS ALL OVER FOLKS" has increased. But functionally, literally nothing is changing.

Let's say someone buys an airline and fires 80% of the maintenance staff.

Sure everything is still flying. For a while at least.

Several companies stock prices plunged costing billions because of that stupid Twitter blue thing when people pretended to be a company and readers didn't check properly to see it was just a parody

Content moderation was more than just removing posts deemed to be 'wrong think'. You have over 200 million users collectively tweeting over a billion tweets a day. Somebody has to keep the trolls and losers posting wildly inappropriate shit at bay. You'll probably notice a lot more troll accounts, troll farms, spamming, hacking and bad actors stirring shit up etc. To be fair, it was already there, just there is no filter and barely anyone left to put a lid on it.

YouTube incorporates AI which is bullshit as it demonitises, removes and age restricts a lot of videos that are absolutely normal

Some guy talking about chess got the video removed deemed as 'offensive' probably because he talked about black and white. Not sure how people will feel about handing control of the FREE SPEECH to some AI bot for Twitter

Twitter does have competition, it's just not as prolific or ingrained in culture yet

If Elon was smart he'd turn Twitter similar to the Chinese 'Wechat' where you can use it for everything. Order food from a restaurant table, pay with it, video conferencing etc. It's like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Zoom etc all in one

He needs to make Twitter an 'all in one' service rather than just occupy a niche field if he wants to see it make a profit. It will never make profit if it keeps on its current trajectory

But of course, Elon being Elon, treated his staff like dogshit and now has nobody to help him. He might as well start over at this point which kinda defeats the purpose of even buying Twitter to begin with

Yeah, the whole parody account thing was funny. It happened for one day, and was shut down very fast.
The user experience? A lot of people gasped, thought it was funny, or did not notice. So zero user experience defect. Companies making missiles got some bad press for a day.

Content moderation is important, I agree. But I think their entire approach to content moderation was 100% wrong. They banned people for saying anything anti PC. Not hate speech, not inciting violence. Just saying stuff that was of bad taste. Their content moderation team is still partly there, but I dont think much is lost by starting nearly over there.

Twitter does not have competition. People need to know you exist for you to be considered competition. Not saying competition could not arise, but its at least a year or 2 away.

If Elon was smart he'd turn Twitter similar to the Chinese 'Wechat' where you can use it for everything

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/elon-musks-twitter-plans-may-take-inspiration-from-chinese-super-apps.html thats literally his plan

He might as well start over at this point which kinda defeats the purpose of even buying Twitter to begin with

He bought users. Starting over means you start with zero users.

Let's say someone buys an airline and fires 80% of the maintenance staff.

Sure everything is still flying. For a while at least.

There is a tight ratio between engineers needing to service planes, and the amount of planes you have for an airline.

There is not a tight ratio between users and staff you need for a website.

He bought users. Starting over means you start with zero users.

Elons not some random guy no one knows. He's a house hold name (for good or bad reasons) around teh world

Twitter doesn;t have that many users when compared to say Facebook

He could have saved much more money building an app from the ground up. Every app started somewhere. Uber gutted the taxi industry in a relatively short time. Who the hell even is the founder of that? Who was he before?

Elon could have started another company and poached Twitter devs to work for him. Twitter was a sinking ship already - would not have been hard to replace it if your app offered much more

Quote from: Crouton on November 19, 2022, 07:38:33 AM

Let's say someone buys an airline and fires 80% of the maintenance staff.

Sure everything is still flying. For a while at least.

There is a tight ratio between engineers needing to service planes, and the amount of planes you have for an airline.

There is not a tight ratio between users and staff you need for a website.

True but nonetheless there is upkeep that needs to be done.  Security is what comes to mind.  Twitter is a juicy target for hackers.  Their methods keep evolving.  Anyone that runs a platform has to keep up.  We actually see this here to an extent. 

There's also just basic maintenance.  Twitter is a machine that's plugged into the internet which is also a machine.  The internet keeps changing so twitter has to adapt.  A few days ago there was a report of 2 factor authentication breaking down. 

https://www.ign.com/articles/twitters-two-factor-authentication-started-failing-for-certain-users

I don't know if it's working again now but if it is then it's because some engineers took the time to fix it.

Quote from: Wolvaccine on November 19, 2022, 07:26:44 AM

Several companies stock prices plunged costing billions because of that stupid Twitter blue thing when people pretended to be a company and readers didn't check properly to see it was just a parody

Content moderation was more than just removing posts deemed to be 'wrong think'. You have over 200 million users collectively tweeting over a billion tweets a day. Somebody has to keep the trolls and losers posting wildly inappropriate shit at bay. You'll probably notice a lot more troll accounts, troll farms, spamming, hacking and bad actors stirring shit up etc. To be fair, it was already there, just there is no filter and barely anyone left to put a lid on it.

YouTube incorporates AI which is bullshit as it demonitises, removes and age restricts a lot of videos that are absolutely normal

Some guy talking about chess got the video removed deemed as 'offensive' probably because he talked about black and white. Not sure how people will feel about handing control of the FREE SPEECH to some AI bot for Twitter

Twitter does have competition, it's just not as prolific or ingrained in culture yet

If Elon was smart he'd turn Twitter similar to the Chinese 'Wechat' where you can use it for everything. Order food from a restaurant table, pay with it, video conferencing etc. It's like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Zoom etc all in one

He needs to make Twitter an 'all in one' service rather than just occupy a niche field if he wants to see it make a profit. It will never make profit if it keeps on its current trajectory

But of course, Elon being Elon, treated his staff like dogshit and now has nobody to help him. He might as well start over at this point which kinda defeats the purpose of even buying Twitter to begin with

Yeah, the whole parody account thing was funny. It happened for one day, and was shut down very fast.
The user experience? A lot of people gasped, thought it was funny, or did not notice. So zero user experience defect. Companies making missiles got some bad press for a day.

Content moderation is important, I agree. But I think their entire approach to content moderation was 100% wrong. They banned people for saying anything anti PC. Not hate speech, not inciting violence. Just saying stuff that was of bad taste. Their content moderation team is still partly there, but I dont think much is lost by starting nearly over there.

Twitter does not have competition. People need to know you exist for you to be considered competition. Not saying competition could not arise, but its at least a year or 2 away.

Quote

If Elon was smart he'd turn Twitter similar to the Chinese 'Wechat' where you can use it for everything

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/elon-musks-twitter-plans-may-take-inspiration-from-chinese-super-apps.html thats literally his plan

Quote

He might as well start over at this point which kinda defeats the purpose of even buying Twitter to begin with

He bought users. Starting over means you start with zero users.

The only competition Twitter has right now is the fediverse. Lots of people made accts on Mastodon, then went back to Twitter to complain about Mastodon! The fediverse is hard for people to understand because they are used to corporate websites that make everything easy. The same kinds of people who join FES and can't figure out how to make posts or don't know about image hosting.

Also, I hardly ever tweet anything, but I like to go there to follow the internet culture wars. Other than a few times (a couple weeks ago) where I got the "something went wrong" message I haven't noticed anything different about how Twitter works.

Competitor? Where?

Well, until it can be shown that something like Twitter can actually make any money, you're unlikely to get any.  They want a share of those massive losses?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-emails-remaining-twitter-staff-to-find-anyone-who-actually-writes-software/

Elon wants the remaining devs to send screenshots of their code.

Screenshots...