It's frustrating to regularly hear people (particularly on HN, but not exclusively) justifying, or even just giving a light nod of approval, to Musk's horrendous "leadership" via firings, simply because twitter isn't profitable in their eyes.
It seems like cherry-picking excuses to support Musk's leadership style rather than any justified basis. If the parent comment is correct, they just aren't as profitable as Wall Street would like (therefore they are not "profitable"). Saying that the firings are justified is then just moving the goalposts to support an a-priori conviction.
Additionally, it seems ironic that this is coming from proponents of the Silicon-Valley ethos of "screw profitability, we'll figure it out later"... an ethos that created Amazon and so many other tech titans. Yes, profitability matters, but only when your other forms of capital (e.g., social, political) have been depleted.
It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither.
Well, twitter being badly managed company and musk being a wanker at same time is also pretty common sentiment. Just that musk fanboys are pretty loud.
> It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither.
Is it tho ? The social capital Twitter had was just used to push ideas of whoever was in charge there at the time. It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network.
Just like a week ago we had HN discussion about how after firing a bunch of people Japanese twitter suddenly stopped being so political [1], coz those topics were being forced.
Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term.
>It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network.
Is there a difference? From what we've seen over the past couple of decades, it seems like social networks are doomed to devolve into propaganda machines.
>Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term.
There is a difference between people using platform as propaganda machine and platform itself picking a side and deprioritizing anything that they don't like, especially with reach it has.
First one is de facto popularity contest and each side is free to call on other's bullshit, if control comes from company running it the detractors from "right" vision gets silenced,either explicitly, or by just modifying algorithm to deprioritize their content
Twitter stock returned ~30% vs 190% for nasdaq in the same period... let's not pretend this company is even remotely close to being performant. I'd be far more inclined to believe "we rolled our own" engineering excellence stories from a massively profitable organization, rather than this confused-about-being-a-nonprofit company.
Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture.
> Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture
Trying to make the place profitable by firing large swaths of their coworkers. You make it sound like people started jumping overboard right when the rescue crew was on the way, rather than when a new captain took over and started trying to stop the ship from sinking by forcibly tossing people himself.
It’s because people are looking at him and saying, “whoa, I can behave like that and not only get away with it, but win by it?!”
There’s room for sincere curiosity about what’s going on and what’ll happen, but a lot of what I see online is people just relishing in the sadism of the whole ordeal.
Part of the mostly made up version of the American Dream is like "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" which oddly also implies "and then once you have, close the door behind you. Don't want this party getting too crowded". My point is that fetishizing capitalism requires a taste for squeezing others for all their worth. If others aren't, then that means you endured that bootstrap pain for no reason!
I think this is nearly as destructive of a perspective. People have become way, way too obsessed with what is entertaining and are willing to accept way too much horrible stuff in the name of the lulz.
It’s really not a game show. There are important ideas being tested and norms being created (or destroyed).
Well I see Twitter in its previous form as actively harmful to society, especially since few years ago when Twitter decided that they no longer just show what's popular but actively manipulate it [1]. Like, the short format was bad enough on its own (encourages shouting in the void instead of actual discussion), and that's just more bad on top of bad
And I also see musk's compulsive lying and arrogance as harmful, althought in more limited scope.
So from my perspective it's one bad thing destroying other bad thing. What's not to be happy about ?
Sure, Twitter transforming into not a vile piece of shit it is today into something decent would also be nice outcome but I don't even know how that would work so it burning is next best thing.
There are a lot of things to criticize about Twitter but it shows a lack of imagination if you think the worst possible thing you could do with a 160MM+ daily active users is give them short form conversation dynamics, and that the other possible outcome is “it burns.”
It is absolutely possible that Twitter turns into a 4chan-esque cesspool of vitriol and hatred but at massive scale due to a gradual frog boil of 160MM+. Not to say Twitter had none of this, but again, it takes little imagination to worry about it getting much, much worse.
How is it horrible? In my view, Twitter is actively harmful to society, so seeing it crash and burn is not only funny, but looks like a good thing, even if it means some highly-paid SWEs need to find new jobs.
A 160MM+ DAU social network “crashing and burning” doesn’t mean “poof” one night and it’s gone.
The biggest self-own in the industry will be if Elon is successful and then the whole software industry suddenly is inspired not by (yes, perhaps excessive) kindness/comfort/generosity of a good work life but by cut throat PE-style management with an added layer of emotional manchild tantrums.
There’s a reason VCs are cheering this on and it’s because lower standards in the software industry will save them all money.
Well hopefully Twitter will completely implode and what's left will be sold off for a tiny, tiny fraction of what Elon spent for it. Then the VCs will have to come to grips with the idea that having lower standards and cutthroat management doesn't result in profitability, but rather utter failure.
Finding pleasure in the suffering of other people is quite literally the definition of sadism. Be proud of it if you want, but that’s what it is.
Also, it’s very obviously not true that all the people who lost their jobs are highly paid. It’s curious how this self-deception keeps appearing among people who are cheering it on.
He isn't firing those people as a component of "leadership", he's clearly cleaning house. He doesn't _want_ the vast majority of twitter staff to remain for obvious reasons.
He obviously doesn't want the majority of staff to say. I don't think it is for obvious reasons. In fact, I doubt he knows what the majority of the staff does, he just assumes it's obvious.
Let's just say Twitter staff weren't very happy and vocal about it when before acquisition he said he want it to be more free speech platform, and most of those people looked pretty left leaning.
Now of course that was tiny minority of workers there, but there seemed to be zero that's happy about it before acquisition so the "obvious reason" is "aside from cost cutting he's kicking people that would give resistance to whatever he wants to do with twitter"
can we please stop with this 'freedom of speech' bogeyman that Musk spouts? He cherry-picks what previously banned accounts get unbanned, he fires employees for making public tweets he doesn't like, as well as firing employees for making comments in company slack channels critical of his leadership - which is a notable departure from previous company policy.
Of course if employees don't believe in leaderships vision they might not be a good fit. Of course a company looking to cut costs is going to look at trimming their workforce. This all makes sense, it just has absolutely nothing to do with free speech.
Oh I don't believe that compulsive liar for a second, I'm just saying that it triggered some people once he started talking about maybe "moderating" (censoring by any other name) less of it
It seems like cherry-picking excuses to support Musk's leadership style rather than any justified basis. If the parent comment is correct, they just aren't as profitable as Wall Street would like (therefore they are not "profitable"). Saying that the firings are justified is then just moving the goalposts to support an a-priori conviction.
Additionally, it seems ironic that this is coming from proponents of the Silicon-Valley ethos of "screw profitability, we'll figure it out later"... an ethos that created Amazon and so many other tech titans. Yes, profitability matters, but only when your other forms of capital (e.g., social, political) have been depleted.
It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither.