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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):
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.)
The thing is, where are all these people quitting because they don't like the new boss and the new rules going to get jobs? Comparable jobs, at least.
I'm reading stories all the time recently about Amazon/Meta/Google are cutting jobs, shutting down projects and the like. So if you decide you are going to give up your decent-paying job at Twitter because ugh, Musk - where are you going to go?
I see arguments that the big dogs putting in hiring freezes is good for the industry as a whole, since it means smaller firms will now have access to a pool of talent that they couldn't get previously. But part of that "couldn't get previously" is "couldn't match the pay and conditions". If the Twitter people expect to walk into the same or better job elsewhere, (1) are those jobs still out there? (2) how will they feel about "have to move to Michigan for a job with a medium-sized company or bank"?
Musk may be running Twitter into the ground, but amongst all the glee and jeering I see online, nobody seems to be addressing that (a) Twitter is not the only place laying off or cutting costs (b) maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.
I've seen this pointed out, and I think it's quite correct. Twitter was losing money in a boom market; they weren't prepared for a bust. But:
The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk is making wise decisions now" isn't supported. Even when cuts are necessary there can be better ways and worse ways to make them and there's at least circumstantial evidence he's deep into "worse ways".
The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk was making a wise decision to buy Twitter to fix it" is almost outright contradicted. Imagine if he'd had the patience to wait a little longer, until Twitter was already running low on operating funds and making drastic cuts internally. First, the cuts probably would have come out better, since without an ownership change acting as a Schelling point for layoff timings, there wouldn't be a conflict between "need to make a lot of cuts at once to avoid losing the best people to preemptive job changes" and "need to deliberate over who to cut to avoid losing the best people to poor firing choices". Second, he could have been seen as the hero (coming in to save the failing Twitter! outside funding bringing an end to the layoffs!) rather than the villain (coming in to destroy Twitter! laying off people who were totes going to have 20 year careers here otherwise!). Finally, he could have bought it at fire sale prices, rather than "peak of a bubble right before a crash" prices.
Don’t forget the time pressure on him to buy it. It was getting bottier, leftier, and tankier by the week, and had he waited long enough to make it a viable business, he might have himself been banned.
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