bintananth
behind a desk
Now, that right there is masterful trolling. The bait was taken "hook, line, and sinker". 🤣
I wonder how much Elon paid the pair for the photo op. Whatever it was, it was money well spent.
Musk actually buys Twitter.
- Thread starter LordsFire
- Start date
Now, that right there is masterful trolling. The bait was taken "hook, line, and sinker". 🤣
I wonder how much Elon paid the pair for the photo op. Whatever it was, it was money well spent.
That's a position that I can respect, especially him being transparent about it since it implies that there will be a process for requesting a review of such tweets if you disagree with the restriction. So long as it is applied evenly it should be well enough.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
Layoffs are one thing. People don't enjoy them but they can help a bloated company get back in fighting shape.
Purging half your workforce and then losing half of the half you had left, at this speed, is a different story altogether. I know nothing of Twitter but I am quite sure there is not that much fat to cut. At the very least, Musk's ultimatum needed to be delivered first, to calibrate the layoffs against the number of people willing to stay under the conditions he laid out.
A twitter thread about the issues of >50% workforce losses on a company, from the perspective of a startup (which is admittedly different from a large organization):
TL;DR "the most challenging turnover times were ones when our organization was very specialized, and we ended up losing whole parts of the team, where nobody from a group was left to transfer knowledge." ... "Anyone who thinks a major reboot like this is a "good thing" that's going to result major improvements in the near-term are probably deluding themselves."
Sergeant Foley
Well-known member
UCLA Women's Gymnastics Team implying they might leave Twitter 🤔
I've always viewed Musk buying Twitter and burning it down as a win.
Lots of memes and butthurt blue checks in the meantime.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
The crux of the issue is how many people are actually necessary to run Twitter?
And, bluntly put, I have a hard time imagining there's enough work for a thousand people, much less seven and a half.
How many people do you need writing the code?
It's a stripped down forum-board. One person could write the code for something as simple as Twitter; have a team of three or five to make sure you've got all your bases covered, and you're good. Just to be incredibly over-generous, let's multiply that by ten, so we have thirty to fifty people working on code.
How many people do you need maintaining the hardware?
Twitter is primarily (though no longer exclusively) a text message platform. The amount of data you need to send and receive per-tweet is less than a kilobyte. Every Terrabyte of HD space you have should be able to hold a billion tweets, let's call it half a billion for safety's sake. Some people tweet prolifically, but the proportion compared to total account-holders is tiny, and modular blade servers are extremely low-maintenance, so even if we assume you need another one every day to store everything.
Assuming Twitter even uses its own hardware for hosting, my rough guesstimate would be six people, let's say two dozen to be generous and make sure you have people on-call at all times.
What about marketing?
What marketing? Twitter doesn't do marketing, it's the platform that you market on!
What about handling business with advertisers?
Well, now we're starting to get outside my areas of expertise. I'm something of a techie, but I am not a marketing or advertising wonk. Still, assuming a decent employee can handle at least one advertising client per day (I expect the real number is at least four times that high), if you have let's say a hundred people working with those who want to advertise on your platform, that hundred is enough to have over two thousand advertising clients. That can maintain you a business model.
Of course, if the system is mostly automated, which basic ads almost certainly are, it's going to be way faster than that. I'm just deliberately skewing high because it goes against my point.
Let's talk verification process!
Since Elon's new policy makes this such a big deal, let's get super aggressive and have two hundred people whose dedicated job is verifying that whoever is getting their account verified, is who they claim to be. Obviously this isn't what happened so far, because only an automated system (or a lot of malicious employees deliberately verifying things they shouldn't) could get so many impostor accounts so quickly, especially when they need to have their payment information attached to the back end of the account.
Simple process for verifying accounts; look at the application, see if the credit card data corresponds to the name on the account, if yes, approve, if not, deny. If it's a corporate account, look up the corporation's public contact data, call them up, ask if X person applying for an account is actually them, you're done. Because corporations and the like can be a mess, that might take an hour, or even hours, but individual accounts should take minutes. If you're literally just rubber-stamping 'yes this corresponds,' then that should take less than a minute.
Still, let's roughly assume an average of five minutes per verification based on the above, and each of your 200 employees in that department is averaging 12 verifications an hour, or 96 a day, which comes to 19,200 a day for the lot of them. That'd be 5 million a year. Even if I'm off about the average time by an order of magnitude, that's still 500,000 a year, which is pretty big business.
So, then let's hit legal. How many lawyers do you need?
This, in a more ideal world, should be a handful of people, but let's say you've got a hundred lawyers and less-expensive people working as their aides on full time to advise you, fight in court, and manage 'regulatory compliance' crap. Half of their work is probably going to be blocking specific posts in specific countries that don't have a proper attitude towards Free Speech.
All told, this brings us to 474 people. If we assume you need one manager for every ten people, and we don't count those managers as already productive members of their various departments, that brings our total up to 522 employees at Twitter. Let's add another 28 for 'odd jobs,' and we land at 550 total...
Which is about eight percent of the 7500 people that Twitter had on staff.
Obviously, I'm not an expert in running a large corporation. Obviously, there's going to be all kinds of factors that play into exactly how many people you need. That's why I was deliberately generous in each estimate, but even then, I could be substantially wrong in any given category.
The point though, is it is very, very easy to see how Twitter wasn't just bloated, it was horrifically bloated, and what Elon was talking about months before the deal went through, laying off 75% of people...
Well. Laying off half, and another half quitting, sounds like it's just gotten to what he was talking about in the first place. And it's entirely possible he could still trim more people, and not lose what's important. All of this before we even get into the Pareto Distribution.
Those numbers are somewhat solid, though you may want 24/7/365 support on your technicians, which does increase that team's size considerably. Likewise, given the global nature of Twitter, you advertising team might need to be a bit bigger to account for dealing with corporations across various time zones and worldwide (you may even need some remote offices to handle them... IE you might need a Tokyo office to handle Twitter advertisers in Japan and east Asia and a London office to handle Europe+GB). So you could probably get up to around 1000 employees once you add on various support staff (something you did forget, various general support staff... you sorta did with you "round up" number, but you need a certain amount of administrative personnel to help keep things organized and running in an office; managers don't order office supplies after all. Plus you need documentation specialists (technical writers and editors, etc.) to make sure everything written is up to snuff and clear).
It's still considerably less than the 7k they had though...
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
I'm still trying to figure out how Twitter became so influential in the first place it's really got nothing new to bring to the table heck the sietch I'd argue has More features.
first mover advantage and its simple enough for the boomers to get.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
For the rest, even if you're right that you could cut total staff levels by 90%, you can't do it like this. Institutional knowledge will be lost and that kind of thing always takes ten times as much effort to get back as it would have cost to ensure its retention.
Don't mistake my assessment for concern, though. If Twitter dies in fire I'm going to be toasting marshmallows like almost everyone else.
8 million and a half votes on this topic. I fully expect the demonrats to try and rig that vote too by firing up the spam-bots. They cannot win anything without cheating after all.
DarthOne
☦️
Must you insult the poor rats so? They at least can’t choose what they are. Unlike Democrats.
Sobek
Disgusting Scalie
Elon can just ignore the poll and do whatever he wants. Or he can do a extra little trolling and the poll is actually a honeypot to identify spam and bot accounts by tracking the sudden login of 8yo accounts with 2 posts in 2014 who came back to vote and start spamming suspiciously similar "I am leaving twitter this is a threat to Our Democracy" and of course brand new accounts.
Either way the salt is great to see.
Either way the salt is great to see.
He got rid of the people he wanted to get rid of, partly by firing, partly by convincing them to leave on their own volition. He doesn't want the activists and the malingerers. He wants loyalists and hard-workers, and after how Null managed to keep the Kiwi Farms up on his own after the entire world tried to kill his website nothing you say can convince me a shitposting platform like twitter needs thousands of employees to stay up and stay functional. The fact that it's still functioning just fine after 90% of the workforce has been dropped speaks for itself.
Musk is a billionaire who is fully willing to spend millions of dollars for the memes. If he feels like it he can keep the site running out of his own pocket for the rest of his life and he will still be a billionaire, and all he has to do to save money is fire the people who get massive paychecks for no real work.
The reasons behind Twitter's rise a mutlivaried, but "first mover advantage" isn't quite correct.
You have to remember, Twitter originated pre-smartphones. It actually originally was a way for people to chat and communicate between Texting and the Internet. This is where the infamous character limit came from, originally Twitter was limited to 120 characters because Text messages were limited to that size. This is also why Twitter didn't use much encryption or allow direct messages, as both were not really functions that it needed to act as a bridge between. Early Twitter was a way to do mass texts between friends and the like before those were commonly supported features of texting.
What this meant was that Twitter was adopted not by the computer literate like message boards had been, but by people who generally were less computer savy and more extroverted.
That said, aside from a few interesting things like how word of an Earthquake spread on Twitter faster than the actual propigation wave of said Aearthquake did, early Twitter was more or less harmless. The short posting limit I recognized early on as being bad for dialogue and discussion but at the time nobody really though about it being used in that way.
Then came smartphones and Twitter really exploded as it now had a sleek and easy to use interface. With the disconnection of text messaging from Twitter you also saw the character limit of tweets rise a bit, which allowed people to say just a bit more, and this was quite popular. You saw a lot of celebrities sign up and it allowed direct engagement between them andntheir fans in a way that people hadn't really had before. It engaged the media as well. There was a time where people genuinely thought Twitter could replace news reporting with people on the ground reporting a outbthings happening in real time on Twitter, before we had the rude awaking that was things like the Ferguson Riots and the original rise of BLM where the reports on the ground and the investigations later ended up showing two very VERY different things.
Anyway, many media and corporations also took to Twitter as a way of advertising, as it had a large user base and was oriented towards the markets that they wanted to target. It enabled the rise of viral marketing in a way no other platform had and to this day we have seen clever marketing teams use Twitter to drum up recognition and engagement with their brands. For instance, the Snarky Wendy memes spread well beyond Twitter and got people seeing the Wendy's franchise in a new, hipper, light. Governments also saw the use of Twitter as a way to make public announcements, not replacing other traditional ways of doing it, but in addition to, while also enabling feedback from their community in a way announcements via radio or newspaper release did not.
So you had a perfect storm of first mover advantage, corporate and celebrity buy in, and then...
Then came The Trump.
Trump originally was just another celebrity using the platform, but when he announced for President in 2015 it actually caused an explosion in Twitter use. While there had been Potus accounts for Twitter under Obama that had been a governmental account that was Very Serious and used for general announcements and the like. Trump was different, he was campaigning as much via Twitter as via other areas, a constant stream of comments and jabs... and people wanted to see it in person, so they signed up. Itbwas through 2015 and 2016 that put Twitter heavily into the foreground of people's mind, and when Trump won in 2016 despite polling behind Hillary the entire time some Very Important People realized that was in part because Trump had used Twitter to get his message out to the people unfiltered and unspum by the mainstream media. Which is how we ended up with Twitter changing so dramatically starting in 2017, as Trump, and other Conservatives, could not be allowed unfiltered access to the people...
You forget Musk has access to the back end this time, and can go through the votes to see how many are bots.
It's a relatively nifty way to start a public convo about Trump returning, while also ferreting out exactly how much of his engagement is just bots.
Doomsought
Well-known member
That can be automated very easily, all you need to do is display the name on credit card next to the checkmark.
Triggered by Musk, CBS News announces it’s suspending all Twitter activity out of ‘abundance of caution’
CBS Evening News reported that the network is suspending all of its Twitter activity due to "caution" over the "uncertainty" caused by Elon Musk's management.
www.foxnews.com