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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability

By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.

That won't do much (WaPo):

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)

To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).

The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.

If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.

Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.

Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?

(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)

You could run Twitter with 1500 people instead of 7000 (as I’ve argued many times, tech hiring sprees have bloated every big tech business), but you want those 1500 people to be the good ones, you want them to be able to take over for their fired coworkers, and you want them to be distributed so that at least some of the survivors are in all the critical teams you need with the accumulated knowledge to keep the ship moving.

The problem is that in the rocket and electric car businesses, you can 'exploit' highly motivated talent because some huge proportion of aerospace engineers was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and October Sky. People are willing to do the crushing work weeks if they believe that their work is lifting humanity to the stars and enabling the first interplanetary colony in ways that they just won't to make sure MAGA/progressives can snipe at each other with meaningless, puerile gotchas. People at twitter are there for the paycheck, people at SpaceX are there for the dream.

Pretty ironic to hear someone arguing a truly free speech platform—which Musk explicitly says is his most important goal with Twitter—is not that meaningful...on a website that had to be created because of fears of free speech limitations on the social media website from whence it escaped.

A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.

Yeah, he's better at rockets than NASA, but he'll fail at being a Reddit mod. Sure.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter. There might be some silent majority of anarchist/libertarian/hacker-ethos programmers out there who'll jump to do twice the work as their peers in the name of free speech, but any "can't stop the signal" programmers probably weren't already working in the How To Stop The Signal department at Twitter when Musk bought it.

Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.

Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.

(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter.

He was able to rid himself of 90% of them, so it's sort of immaterial.

Somewhat related...

What's interesting to me is all the flack he's getting about giving people the option to either (A) "get hardcore" and work a lot to make Twitter awesome or (B) quit and get severance.

We've gotten a bit nutty about "work-life" balance. Some people don't want that. They like to work a lot. It's not like Musk is enslaving people and forcing them to do manual labor for god's sake. They get to choose to work at a sweet ass campus doing shit they love for great pay.

I'm very certain Musk, literally one of the most recognizable people in the world, can find the people he needs to run a lean & mean ship at Twitter, and make it awesome. Because plenty of people would LOVE to work 60-80 hours a week on a free speech challenge like Twitter, when it is well-positioned to be The Center of the Internet (to the extent is isn't already).

Call me a cynic, but I'm familiar with enough people who do essentially nothing while getting paid (well) for it that I can empathize a lot with Musk here. In my career, I've seen departments with 20 people handling the workload of 2 or 3, and departments that were 90% automated years ago...but the fog of bureaucracy allowed 10 people to just draw a paycheck for standing around and watching a system.

Musk doesn't want dead weight, as no business owner does.

'Meaningful' in this context is subjective. There are plenty of occupations and causes that are critical to humanity that still don't inspire enough fervor in their adherents to make them work 60 work weeks for below-market wages (i.e. graduate school, or at least it was once upon a time), regardless of how many websites are created due to fears of free speech limitations.

I'd be willing to bet that the current workforce isn't willing to work 60 hour weeks in the name of free speech. Whether there's enough people out there that care who will fill the gap after they leave remains to be seen, in addition to whether those people can keep the faith when their ideals collide with the reality of running a social media platform.

I'll bet he'll find people without much problem.

And I'll bet he can run a better Twitter with 10% of the staff.

I have to disagree. A lot of people also care about the information environment. Just as much as people care about going to mars. I don’t want 1984 America with a fb-twitter-Liz Cheney aligned informational environment. I would work extremely hard to prevent that.

Not my core talent but I dropped a resume to twitter a few weeks after he took over. This is a big issue to me. And there are probably others here with more specific talents that care about free speech who should also consider working for twitter.

Perhaps I should have specified that the current workforce is there for the paycheck, not the dream. Good luck if you end up there.

People at twitter are there for the paycheck,

Or worse, they're there for the kind of activism musk distinctly opposes.

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