All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk comments to HN threads? They're tedious and have nasty effects.
I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day. And this is probably just me or my circles, a city's hustle and bustle becomes a distraction or at least increasing irrelevant as I age. I increasingly enjoy ample parking space, tranquil suburbs, being able to step out and start jogging in woods or huge parks, and certainly not having to deal with the craziness on SF streets. If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.
Just in response to your second point, I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city. Without work to keep them occupied, they want the hustle and bustle, which means something to do. And driving has become more of a hassle and a barrier to the kinds of lives they want to live. These are east coast or midwest cities, so maybe there is something about SF that's different, but that's my experience.
I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money: dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to do and your kid knows other kid nearby, low density enough that you get 1500-2500sqft to yourself.
We bailed for seattle because we could get a bigger house and have a better school situation. We did enjoy living on the border between the mission and noe valley before that though.
Seattle is an interesting area, so many different pockets. I moved to Seattle in 2016 from Southern California, could never shake the depression. Moved to Cupertino in Jan and am as happy as a (very busy) clam.
I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt "different".
The Seattle Freeze seems like one of those broad stereotypes, but I experienced it as very real. People are not unfriendly, but they are unsocial. I felt lonelier than any other place I've lived. There are of course many other factors, but I'm not the only one, which is validating.
I’m reading this from Ballard and I think we do alright on school quality and house size, although my east side colleagues think the deal is better in more suburban Kirkland or Bellevue.
It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful of “I don’t always use my car” neighborhoods, which are always the most expensive places to live. So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.
Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk. People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and bigger SUVs.
They actually don't. I mean I do. My wife does, and one or two of our friends do. But almost everyone else we know aren't at all interested in having a walkable city. They love their cars and garages. US cities are the way they are because a great majority of Americans want them that way.
It 100% bums me out, but that's where we are at. Americans that want to walk are a small minority.
Children don't have the patience of parents. They melt down waiting for a bus/transit in snow or summer broiling heat and it becomes a nightmare. I didn't have a car most the time until I had a kid and found quality of life went way up with a car.
I was born in a walkable in Europe. School was 5 minutes (by walk) from home. High school was 10-15 minutes by bus, plus 10 minutes walking to the bus stops. The bus service was very frequent, there was no endless waiting on bus stops in snow or heat. If Communist Poland could pull it of, so could the richest country in the world.
Getting to school works but that's because everyone on the bus is going the same place.
A child can walk to say a cornerstore in the US many places no problem but the parents will be placed under arrest for negligence. Most any other place they'd like to go is most practical with public transit involving a long wait or driving by what appears to the child as a private car chartered at his convenience.
Same thing in Singapore, kids from grade 7 on take public transport to go to school (earlier grade students live close to the school usually). I think Japan is like that too.
Yeah, for a while I used to get around by bicycle a lot (faster and way cheaper than paying for parking on campus), lots of people thought it was very weird to do so. I'd show up at the usual bar scenes with my bicycle after taking the light rail down and most of my friends wouldn't begin to understand how I got there.
I take the local transit when I need to get deeper into the city and take the bus to the city parks around me with my kids. People think I'm a bit of a nut for doing so, seriously wondering why I wouldn't just drive.
I've met people that grew up in Dallas and didn't even know there was light rail. Most people don't have a clue how it works and don't care to spend a minute figuring it out. They don't even bat an eye at the thought of moving further and further out into the burbs, into developments that take ten minutes of driving just to leave one neighborhood.
Where I live in London there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Most people have such a park in a 5-10 minute walk from their home. No need to drive for such short distances. It's better for kids to walk around and experience their neighbourhood, use the time walking to chat with their friends, etc.
Where I live in Texas there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Also often baseball fields and sometimes tennis courts as well. Most people here have such a park in a 10-minute walk from their home.
The majority (dare I say all?) of European kids just take public transport/their bikes to wherever they're going, from a young age. I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.
I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of the US
We're talking about kids here though, not all commuters.
And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10 minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a lot depending on the country you're looking at, and if we're talking about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that the vast majority of kids take public transport or their bikes.
I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I chauffeur them around?"
"The majority" seems strong. When I was in middle school (collège in french), there was a long line of cars in front of the school entrance from parents dropping off their kids. At some point my friend and I started to take the RER to go back home, and we barely saw anyone else.
Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by car.
That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me, they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there, because you had a hard time getting anywhere without a car. Less hard than the US, but still.
Statistically Europeans have longer commutes than Americans because they rely on public transport more while Americans drive and driving is almost always faster than surface public transport since not all Europeans have an underground in their city so public transport is often a slow an infrequent bus in tier 2 cities.
And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of commute to go to swim practice, every day??) over having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?
The concept of supply & demand shows people obviously do want this, given that the cost of living in that walkable city and in walkable places is so high.
The real reason? Americans become infatuated with the latest technological marvel too easily. For a while, this was the car. And unfortunately, rolling back all these car subsidies takes a while and is heavily fought against because people hate the feeling of having something taken from them.
> Have you considered, then, that many people do not actually want this?
If so, the European city planning wouldn’t be popular within the US, but it’s the opposite. The few European style cities are incredibly attractive to live in.
> Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't America be like this?"
Right.. and? They’re not representative? Or it’s unrealistic? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask for those that do get the opportunity to see functional dense urban areas in other places, especially as they don’t require anywhere near SV salaries yet are still lively and safe.
I don’t think the US will drop car centrism, partly because of the perpetual lower class social issues that make it dangerous to share public space with strangers, but you can get pretty far if you mix in high volume public transit like in NYC (or even SF BART for a smaller example), which greatly reduces the dead spaces that prevent walkability.
So many cities outside the US manage to have this as the only redeeming quality. It's nice to not have to walk - it's not so great to have to walk because you can't afford a car and public transit does not cut it for everyone even in the best rated cities of the world. And it's not really interesting to have a dense train network if you can't afford the train ticket; then you're just angry your tax money is spent on it instead of you.
I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on cities with significant tech/business scene.
Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of the US ugly, especially when compared to the European cities.
I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF is not like that. The city feels so much more livable almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts, but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get really depressed.
Respectfully, you’re almost certainly going to the wrong parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now reside inside SF.
Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space.
Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.
I've never been to Boston, but Wikipedia tells me they have several universities - Harvard and MIT, which I've heard of, and also Boston University, Boston College, University of Massachusetts Boston, Bentley University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Northeastern University, Wentworth Institute of Technology and a load of others.
In a city with a population of 600k that's going to be a decent part of the local economy.
Yes, Boston is considered the educational capital of the planet.
Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in that area there is a transient student population of 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20 miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?) universities, making education one of its six or seven tent-pole industries.
To be pedantic, MIT and most of Harvard is Cambridge--across the river from the city of Boston. But, yes, the Boston area has a very university-influenced vibe much of it urban with some exceptions like BC and Wellesley.
There are something like 30 universities in the Boston metro, including some extremely press and wealthy ones. Universities like Harvard and MIT have sprawling research industrial complex’s beyond teaching students. And many thousands of employees, many of whom are high paid professionals.
All that to say nothing of the students. The population of Boston itself is ~600k, while the metro region has ~4M people and roughly 300k students reside in the metro. These are obviously not all local students, but students from all over the world who have come to Boston for education.
I didn’t mean directly that the schools had money, but that neighborhoods and civic fabric was built around the universities. But many do have a lot of money. Students tend not to travel far, so you get lots of self-contained neighborhoods around school. Similar to SF where the hills limit how far you’d walk.
Some of them are even within the borders of cities! See, for example, much of Queens, NY. Forest Hills is especially pretty. If you're not a New York, go back and watch the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and marvel (ha) over the difference between where Aunt May lives and where Peter works.
They still exist, but they are generally absurdly expensive because lots of people want to live there and they aren't particularly dense (although denser than plenty of other areas)
Yes they are. We don't have enough of them and should make more.
Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough density to get economies of scale and insanely great walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public schools were good.
Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about public school quality there, and it's probably hard to afford these days -- but balanced by access to the Manhattan job market)
Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust zoning and incentives to flood the zone with transportation and housing (which help substitute for and encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck choosing between affordable housing and access to education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby creates more than the sum of their parts because workers are often more productive in industry clusters.
I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons. They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes. Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop. The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets, plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war suburbs.
Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3: from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is jam packed with buildings from that era.
In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code.
(please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
but all those buildings are up to code now too right? And the fact that people keep them occupied for so long and renovate speaks to their intrinsic quality I'd think.
but tbh - quality is somewhat a red herring. Today, quality is all because there is caulk (greatest invention), plumbing, and longer lasting paint. Yesteryear, quality was because they used all natural materials which are unaffordable now. Either way, keep a house dry and occupied, and it will stand for centuries, regardless of when it was built.
Homes in greater Boston are definitely not all or even mostly up to code now. My old ~1900 greater Boston apartment still had live knob-and-tube wiring. Fortunately the 1880 home I own now was thoroughly rewired and now more or less in line with the electric code, although it’s still far from modern building code in other domains (plumbing, rafter spacing, insulation, stair rise/run, list goes on).
In some important ways quality was due to the availability of materials, but cheap labor played a big role too. Many building practices before WWII were extremely labor-intensive compared to today. Lathe and plaster walls, knob and tube, board sheathing, fieldstone/rubble foundations, mortise door hardware, etc.
My 1850 triple-decker has code compliant electrical and plumbing, egresses, common area lighting and dual exits. Definitely not accessible and the stairs are typical for the era— the last big brick building I lived in that was built around 1900 was super solid but the stairs were murder— like 7" treads and it was a 4th floor walkup.
> In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago,
> (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
I don't need to link you to anything because I'm talking about places I've lived and as of thus, I've presented exactly as much empirical evidence as you have. And few of the building were brick— almost all of the places I've lived were timber framed. Look up pictures of Southern New England neighborhoods if you want to see what I'm talking about. The television show "This Old House" is entirely based on renovating New England homes from that supposedly poor quality era and it's been on since 1979.
It's clearly different where you live. I know about a half dozen carpenters, including my best friend of thirty years, and every single one of them deliberately sought a house from this era because they are excellent quality.
> thanks mostly to the building code.
The building code will reduce the risk of fires and reduce the risk of dying in them if they occur, it will ensure that people looking to make a quick buck flipping a shoddy will have a harder time doing so, it will ensure your plumbing will probably work for a while— but better building materials were much cheaper, as was skilled labor, and there were quite a number of known good designs for the areas quirks with weather, etc. They were generally just plain-old good?
Is this really true? Unless urban renewal demolished them wholesale, all late 19th century neighborhoods exist virtually fully intact. There was no filtering of low quality vs high quality.
Beyond that, in the area I refer to, Southern New England, the vast majority of those buildings are still in everyday regular use, and with the exception of obsolete institutional or industrial buildings, very few have been demolished. Of course, some got leveled to build bigger buildings, but not that many. I would say 95% of residential buildings within a mile of me are from 1915 or earlier, most of them timber framed, and my neighborhood has about 15k people per square mile, so it's a decent sample size.
This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"
That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.
Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?)
I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”
> the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers
This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.
I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3 days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siècle" - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the left wing at that time.
I mean this depends on what specifically you’re optimizing for.
A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of taking public transit and using their two feet, though.
Have you not heard of school buses or soccer moms?
Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers and/or private schools.
The public school system in SF is also notoriously terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as ‘equity’ changes results in bussing kids all over town so there are no ‘good’/‘bad’ schools due to demographics. So siblings will often end up in schools on different sides of town, or kids in a school very far from where they live.
The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get ‘bad’ things like a school where all the neighbors kids also go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they can buy into a ‘good school district’. Among other things.
SFUSD only busses kids with special needs. Everybody else has to get to school on their own.
Siblings get preference for the same school, so it's pretty unlikely they'd be on different sides of town.
SFUSD has tons of problems but you are not accurate in your description of what they are.
The real problem is that the kids of parents who can't drive them to school end up having to go to a local school anyway, so the egalitarian idea of having kids go to any school did not actually work out as a positive for anybody but kids who were already privileged enough to have someone drive them to school.
Yeah, I’m saying that parents can choose to live in cities to avoid being just a soccer parent forever.
School bus routes have been decimated in much of the country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake up times for children. And a school bus doesn’t take you to any place outside of school and the home.
Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant, or any number of things without having to involve parents for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.
That doesn't matter anymore because although kids are probably as smart as they've ever been, everyone has a cellphone in their pocket and will rat the family out to CPS if the child exhibits independence.
Kids still get driven to school in my neighborhood that wont let you enroll if you're more than a mile or so away (officially it's a walking school). Yet every day the street it's on becomes packed with cars trying to pick their child up instead of just letting them walk home.
I've heard about the lotto system but assumed the school district would be obligated to bus kids (i.e. not force them to use public transit alone). The parents have issues with the school bus??
Don't forget access to doctors and hospitals. I browse city-data at times out of boredom, and it's a major concern for retired people considering relocating anywhere.
In fact I know a retired guy who moved to Maui, and then moved back. The principal reason was the saying they have, "If you have a pain, get on a plane."
You might get served in Honolulu. Quite often you're flying to the mainland, though.
That said, living right in the city isn't necessary at all. The 'burbs have almost every facility you could want.
I lived in Maui for a year and it was always in the back of my mind that my link to civilization was basically one road. And my apartment was just north of Lahaina.
That said I watched my dad die of cancer and let's just say he would have been better off chillin' on a beach or a balcony staring out into the ocean.
The doctors couldn't really do anything other than misdiagnose him and then put him on meds way too late.
I'd pick quality of life over fear of a potential medical issue.
Agreed. My family lives on an island, though not in HI. We've had to do the medivac on one occasion. Yeah it was a bit unnerving and a major pain in the ass but we're still here a few years later.
I'd much rather optimize for the happy days than the shitty ones.
It almost makes retiring to Southeast Asia reasonable. Yes, you don’t get Medicare, but then paying out of pocket reasonable prices for medical services means you aren’t eating for anything either, plus you get the beach and affordable everything else living. As long as you don’t get cancer.
For people aging and not in the best of health, declining vision/response times makes driving riskier, and there is often a preference for homes without stairs as well, which might very well be a condo with an elevator. Then there’s also common area maintenance in condos vs. the manual labor of lawn care, pool care, etc.
- crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk around safely at night
- lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF has neither)
- rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for projects
- not clean
- Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont
I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food (by my standards) everywhere.
In SF, the northeast quadrant has most of the good public transit. Does that not fit your needs? And, I disagree that Taipei and Chengdu are significantly cleaner than SF -- about the same level of grime in my experience.
No. The public transit there hardly goes anywhere in reasonable time. It takes a good 40 minutes just to get across it. Many times I've walked faster to my destination than the public transit estimates. The Muni trolleys get stuck at intersections and red lights and don't move faster than cars. The BART only goes down 1 smelly street. I'd spend 2 hours round trip (1 hour each way) just to buy a vegetable from the nearest Ranch 99. That's not city life.
Most Asian public transit systems blaze past all the cars on the surface. They actually save time from driving.
Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it in.
I have never been refused restroom access (and there was almost always a public one within 100m at all times) in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is basically Asia), people are usually nice here about letting you use restrooms.
In my experience everybody grown up outside a big city and especially in the countryside, look at big cities and say "no no, it's a mess, I'll never live there." That's independent from the age. Of course they go there for concerts, theaters, museums, maybe hospitals. People grown up in a big city tend to have the opposite reaction, ranging from "it's like being dead" to "there is nothing to do", which of course is false: there are different kind of activities. People that like sports usually will feel better outside a city.
You know what sucks? A ton of families-with-kids would love to stay in the city, if only the schools-- especially high schools-- were on par with what can be found for similar price in the suburbs. There is no physical reason it should be like this; in fact, just the opposite. Cities may have the density to support more bars, but they also have the density to support more varied after school kids' activities and cultural attractions, etc (and the ability to let middle and high school aged kids walk themselves to school and other places rather than becoming a chauffeur)
But the failing schools push many parents out against their own and their own childrens' preferences.
This is one of the weird dysfunctions of the USA. It's really not that different to how a lot of third world cities leave a lot of potential wealth on the table by having poorly functioning electrical grids with scheduled black outs. In both cases nobody really benefits and there's no real net savings for society, it's just money left on the table and burned away and is the biggest reason cities are seen as child-unfriendly when in fact they are inherently more friendly to children than a suburb where you're a prisoner till you get a driver's license.
For another couple data points - my middle aged friends with kids who moved to my city did so for much of the same reason as you suggest the younger and older folks do. There's just more services for their kids: clubs, day care, pediatrics, playgrounds, sports teams, museums, etc. I have a few middle aged friends who moved away from my city, but they moved to bigger cities (Chicago, NYC) for work.
Curious, if you ever see this - where in the city did they move? Like an inner suburb/outer ring of the city? Into a block of townhouses/condos? Near family/friends?
I'm curious how folks who happily live in the city with kids approach it
Idk about your second point, it’s only because I live in the city that I have time to enjoy it, after work and kids commuting to and from the city is too much of a time sink and there’s fuck all to do everywhere else in the bay.
Exactly this. I grew up on a farm, was a student in the city, started a family in the countryside and I want to retire in a city, as long as it’s close to my children.
I've polled my friends about this, and our group is a about 50/50. Some of us when looking at comments never read the usernames, we just completely skip over it. And some alway do - the next is right there of course you'd read it!
It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any obvious correlation between other traits in my informal survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set of personality traits that correlates with reading vs ignoring user names.
I don't skip commentor names intentionally, but HN makes it really easy with the stupid (not sorry) light grey on slightly darker grey text. Contrast is an accessibility issue, and HN sucks at it.
Middle ages folks hate it because they are most likely to have kids and cities (in the US) tend to be kid hostile. What I'm calling city below is probably better described as downtown - most cities extend out farther and have areas that are nothing like what follows - but are also nothing like what you described as what people move to the city for.
Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.
Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars might allow kids to eat there).
Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows are not what kids would be interested in, and because they will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will be - not kid friendly shows).
Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.
Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more. You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city apartment.
Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've concluded that this because of the other factors above - few families live there and so not enough people care to make them good. It does however stop many families that might want to try living in the city.
> what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.
Right, sprinting back-and forth, ear-piercing screams at the top of their lungs, kicking chairs - all things we should just accept at a restaurant, for the sake of the parents. What terrible people we are for wanting a decent dining experience.
When I was a kid, going to a restaurant was a treat and a privilege. If my sister or I misbehaved, we were taken out to the car, and might not get to go to a restaurant again for a while.
I see kids in restaurants these days and mostly find their behavior appalling. And it's sad the best-behaved kids are only quiet because they have an iPad in front of them. (No headphones, of course, so that's another annoyance the rest of us have to put up with.)
When I was a kid the only restaurant I was allowed to go to was Friendly's, and only on my/my siblings birthdays. It was a HUGE treat and I knew to be on my very best behavior because if there was any acting up, even a little, I wouldn't be allowed out to eat out ever again.
Nowadays kids aren't expected to behave in a restaurant, so they don't. It's about expectations.
> "Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids."
Any child older than a toddler should be able to sit quietly and respectfully eat a meal. If they can't, that's bad parenting.
Sitting still for long periods is naturally difficult for little kids. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to go nuts, but a kid who just sits quietly for long periods with no signs of antsiness might be having their spirit crushed by authoritarian parents (or might just be unusually calm). Good parenting is a give and take.
The restaurant isn't going to complain about the kids chatting or pushing peas around on their plate. If the wait staff are willing to risk the ire of pissed off parents to say something, the kids must be going nuts.
Cities are far more kid-friendly than suburbs, especially for kids from age ~9–18. Everything is walkable or can be reached by transit, many more amenities and activities are accessible, kids are dramatically less dependent on parents or other caretakers to constantly chaperone them, and there are a wider variety of other kids around with many niche interests.
Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be bad for their kids for one reason or another or consider the suburbs to be more personally convenient for the parents. For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful while suburbs are often boring and repressive.
> For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful and suburbs are often a kind of prison
I grew up in a mega city and I agree that cities are wonderful for kids, at least they were wonderful for me and my friends. I'd venture to guess that kids don't care. Cities or not, the world is just so much fun and exciting.
I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though. My kids love suburbs, and they also love cities when they spend days and nights there.
It's not that parents falsely think that cities are bad for kids (it may be a factor for some people, of course), but that parents themselves do not want to live in a busy city. For instance, I have zero interest in bars or clubs. In fact, they are way noisy for my social needs. Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods and shaded trails. And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point). Or take Asian supermarket for another example. There are really not that many choices in SF or NYC. Even for the available ones, let's say H Mart in NYC, I really don't like the cramped space. I want to have those spacious walkways and shelving and big food court and etc.
> Suburbs can be prisons if there’s not enough people your age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had friends I’d walk to after school. Makes it more fun than having to organize car dates until someone gets a car. But nowadays kids are so supervised I don’t know if they hang outside anymore
Totally. There seem fewer kids in the neighborhood than before too. Play-date is such a suburb concept for the US kids. As a kid, I used to hang out with neighbor kids, sometimes more than a dozen, every day. Not any more for my kids in the suburb. To that end, I admire my Indian friends. Even during the most panicking days of Covid, they would organize weekly meetups of multiple families, so kids got to play together.
That seems like both a generational and cultural thing, vs a urban/sub-urban consideration. Prior generations in the US had kids just hangout with whomever in the neighborhood be it urban or sub-urban too. Playdates are probably just as common in urban areas now, the cultural change wasn't specific to the built-environment.
> And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point).
Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints about suburbia.
>> Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints about suburbia.
I think they literally mean "Club house" -- the shared services center for the housing development. High-rises often have them, large developments have them.
In NYC, our high-rise had a reading room, yoga room, gym, entertainment center, as well as a paved playing area for building residents inside building premises. People met each other regularly at these places and socialized. This is very common (minus the paved playing area, which is rare.)
In the burbs we also have most of these, and also tennis courts and a pool.
Many of these served as a "Third Place" for residents, especially once you have kids because it isnt as easy to hang out elsewhere. Unlike previous centuries, I'm constantly on my phone or on call explicitly or implicitly, at least in my profession, so social clubs seem unrealistic, though I know the wealthy folks go there regularly.
Even cheap/mid tier apartment complexes around me have a clubhouse with a pool, a small gym, maybe a billiard table and what not. It is not very expensive to do when land is cheap.
My last apartment wasn't super high-end and it even had a golf simulator in it along with a billiard room kind of a theater room with a giant TV and some big couches.
> I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though.
Personally, I grew up in a suburb that didn't have transit and it was miserable. I barely saw my friends until I got a car. Every time I go back with my lady it's miserable for both of us because, besides family, there's just nothing there but some cookie cutter parks. There was one historical park that's still nice but its also a mile away from my mom's house and there's inconsistent sidewalks (it's either take a much longer route or risk walking alongside a 1 ft wide shoulder with a 35mph speed limit and curves.
> Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods and shaded trails.
Most places that have woods at all also have this.
Golden gate park+presidio in SF, discovery+arboretum+Seward+ a bunch more in seattle, central park in NYC, fairmont park in Philly are all places I've loved walking/biking around (and to).
Suburbs can be prisons if there’s not enough people your age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had friends I’d walk to after school. Makes it more fun than having to organize car dates until someone gets a car. But nowadays kids are so supervised I don’t know if they hang outside anymore
This assumes that the parents consider the city safe enough for the kids to wander around unsupervised. The perceptions may be bullshit, but people still act on them. Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower on pretty much every test than the suburban ones, sometimes by large margins.
By far the biggest danger for children wandering around (in rural area, suburb, or city) is big cars moving quickly. But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour. (Or more realistically, plenty do worry, and keep the kids indoors or drive them everywhere instead of letting them wander around independently.)
> Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower
This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children in the class than it does to do with school or teacher quality per se.
But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class parents are also inordinately worried that their children might spend too much time near poorer children who get worse test scores because their families have fewer resources and they were not as academically prepared.
> But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour.
The pavements are often much wider in suburbs, and/or separated from the road by trees. That's the difference. You're not in a high rise apartment building that opens directly on to pavement, which is 4ft from a road.
Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.
But that most places in the USA are pretty unsafe for pedestrians nowadays, especially children. We would do well to introduce traffic calming, improve pedestrian/bike infrastructure, and cut speed limits in all areas where people commonly walk down to a max of about 20 miles/hour.
It would also make streets much safer to reduce the proportion of SUVs and large pickup trucks. Disincentivizing these vehicles should be an explicit government policy goal.
Those are all great ideas, but to the average voter you might as well be saying we should outlaw apple pie. Political will behind reforms like this is very hard to find and always in danger of being voted out by angry drivers.
> Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.
That's true. Housing is expensive because the city is great and people want to live here, but the direct results of expensive housing are harmful to the society (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.).
It would be a significant benefit to the people of SF if the western half of the city were significantly upzoned with a lot of new housing construction here and throughout the Bay Area, and ideally rent and house prices cut by something like half (gradually rather than in a market crash), so that more of the people necessary to run the city could afford to live here.
> (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.)
I’ve long pointed out to conversation mates IRL that for a technological civilization like ours, shelter costs are a straight deadweight, Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cost upon the innovation throughput that is the civilization’s lifeblood. In the U.S., healthcare pricing policies are as well, but that’s a different conversation. Both are stranded capital that need unlocking towards increasing the technological development pace.
But most people with mortgages are trapped like a monkey’s fist around a fruit in a jar, by the siren song of house appreciation.
I’d rather have fusion, life extension, solar system colonization, mind uploads and AGI sooner than be “rich” in real estate.
The purpose of capitalism is not technological advancement, innovation, or efficient deployment of resources. The purpose of capitalism is that rich people get paid for being rich.
If you believe otherwise, you will learn the hard way when you seek your reforms and find that none of the people spouting the high-minded capitalist rhetoric support the actions that would bring it closer to reality. In short, the monkey's hand isn't trapped. The monkey is masturbating into the jar. It knows exactly what it is doing and you will not be thanked for interrupting.
There are? I see the opposite trend (at least in US East Coast) - cities only have generic amenities, while all the unusual stuff is in the suburbs, where the the land is cheap.
For example, let's take a relatively common hobby of sewing. The two stores in downtown closed tens of years ago, and the only ones left are in the suburbs, unreachable without the car.
I think at this stage, the only advantage of city is bars, restaurants, and expensive clothing/jewelry. If you like something else, you are better off in suburbs with a car.
The jobs are in the city because the people are there, and the people are there because the jobs and other people are there. Empirically, both residents and employers prefer to relocate to the city.
The city is convenient and fun: it provides easier transportation, more amenities, more other people to engage with, more companies of all types to do business with, etc.
You ignore the fact that many European cities are much smaller than the North American mega city landscape and still have lots of jobs in those cities. But it's also easier to have safer yet walkable and publicly transportabel neighborhoods in a city of 150k or 300k than 3 or 10 million.
There's plenty of American cities from 50k-300k, that's not a uniquely European thing.
None of the jobs where I grew up were in the city (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, largest employers were all suburban campuses save for the electric company and some colleges. Even the hospitals were off the highway.).
All the fun stuff was in the city though, so that's where we'd go once you got a friend of driving age.
> Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.
This doesn’t describe Seattle or any other city I’ve lived in. We literally have 3 huge ball fields within walking distance of my town home, all full up on weekends and even most weekday nights with soccer, baseball, etc…
> Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand.
Leaving NYC my son was disappointed in almost any park we'd go to. Most smaller cities and towns have a few decent playgrounds but in the city we had 3-4 in walking distance that were amazing and another 10 within a single subway stop.
It's very variable. There's also a lot of inertia once people are established in the suburbs/exurbs. I know some examples but I don't actually know a ton of cases of people moving into the city upon retirement.
Also, a lot of older people don't want big houses, and having easy access to amenities and socialization is more important than having extra empty bedrooms.
I will get downvoted for this comment: Size of living area does seem to be highly influenced by gender. I hear many more men say they would be happy living in a smaller place. I never once heard that from a woman under 50. (After the kids are gone, they may wish to downsize.)
Let me be the first one then - I am fully content on living in a 40-60m2 space with my partner and two cats. Considering we never lived in anything bigger this size is perfect for us, easy to clean and still enough space to live.
You're talking about different age groups. You mention retired people (who are likely empty nesters), but the age group OP is talking about are middle-aged CEOs with young kids or teenagers.
anecdotally, city life becomes a net drain when one doesn't have time for themselves. In my mid-thirties now, and keeping up with family/travel/hobbies is more than I can handle on most days. I've gone to a great number of restaurants in the past and ... getting more sleep seems like a better bet for the day then going to another restaurant.
I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at home and have reached retirement.
> I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city
Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the challenges of raising kids.
cities cost more for smaller spaces. when you've got a family you need that space, but for two empty-nesters, a city location is smaller, easier to manage, and closer to things. elevators and small apartments on a single floor might even be preferable -- no stairs for bad knees.
also if you're not able to drive cuz your eyes or reaction time are bad, being walkable helps -- that exercise might even keep grandpa healthier, longer.
and in the case of my in-laws, a big draw was proximity to (good) medical care. literally walkable to the local hospital and medical services, and if something goes bad the ambulance can get them there ASAP.
and then you have more food options, more entertainment, etc.
> I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people...
Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be specific to you and your circles.
In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally that some older people move to live near where they themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale trends.
Back in the early 90s my wife and I moved to SF because it had a thriving art and music scene and more interesting culture than the 'burbs of palo alto. But as you say, the long commute to SV was a killer and we moved back down. Back then SF was a bedroom community for SV with no tech sector. Businesses up there were banking (Wells Fargo, BofA, Crocker etc), retail, the local stock exchange, and a bunch of manufacturing.
Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.
I lived in San Francisco in the very late 70s through to the 00s. My first apartment share was $50/mo. The late 70s had the dying embers of the Beat Generation and San Francisco was a sleepy town. San Francisco was great in the 80s with a ton of theater, music, dance, art, everything. It was good in the 90s although the late 90s dotcom boom pushed/priced artists out. The 00s became pretty boring and compressed. I moved to Oakland.
I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.
I've seen similar complaints from cities in rich countries around the globe
Basically to have thriving arts scene you need people in the 20s-30s to be able to live on a minimum wage job and do art/music/whatever in their spare time. Even better if it is a part-time job or some sort of government scheme.
If your cost of living is too high then you are restricting yourself to trust-fund 20yo and older people with a bit of spare time. Also high property reduce the number of venues.
Oakland is more affordable for artists now than San Francisco but not even close to what San Francisco was in the 80s. But it's a very different time. I find myself occasionally trying to relive that and having to remind myself it's gone.
Oakland has crime now but 80s San Francisco had the drug wars with actual machine gun battles between the now gone high rise projects on Army (now Caesar Chavez).
Depends on one's interests. It sounds like my preferences would be more in alignment with yours - music and art - and yes, SF is almost completely lacking that today. But if one were an active part of the LGBT community - SF is a buzzing option. They have various festivals and events almost daily.
Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either. Definitely more independent music events in run down houses, but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable value.
it's true, the techies of the '90s and '00s who lived in sf embraced the culture (and suffered the commute). what happened in the '10s kinda steamrolled it.
> There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs.
Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago. He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.
It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out. Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.
Oh, right. That was around the time of the strange merger with McDonnell Douglas. Somehow, the finance people from McDonnell Douglas ended up in charge. That didn't go well.
> If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.
I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles
Google has offices in San Francisco but it also has offices in South San Francisco, San Bruno, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. And probably some other cities I forgot. The "reason" Google has an office anywhere has to do more with "why not" rather than anything else.
Not the case with the main Google SF office (except now some buildings are indeed the results of acquisitions) but definitely for San Bruno and varied for the other ones.
I had the impression the Google SF office was for capturing that talent that would not be bothered to commute south; but that for most people there it was a career dead end, if you weren’t in Mountain View you weren’t in the game.
At least that’s what the people I know who worked there told me, I don’t have any real inside knowledge and the stories could be wrong despite being plausible.
Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams wanted to move there, and then...and then...
I wish I understood what you're getting at, because Google does not consider it's employees at all at this point, it's late stage capitalism sweetie. Is there a point, can you clarify?
I mean, even by Marx's own theory. There will be no communism without capitalism fully unfolding and playing out. How will we know when the difference between one stage and the next? Unless we are talking revolution but that's not what most modern communists have in mind
The mentioned South Bay locations are xAI's Palo Alto office, and an office in Santana Row. Both locations likely have connections to Caltrain.
I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.
Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.
The Santana Row office is miserable to get to via Caltrain. You're going to want to bike or scooter and even then it's a trip on Stevens Creek/San Carlos, which is exceptionally busy at all times of day due to the two malls next to it and also it drops bike lanes for some portion of the road.
I feel like this was the case already? Maybe not for 2 hours but I do distinctly remember that when I popped into the Twitter offices for a bit I was able to park there for a few hours but after that it would charge me
i concur. I think a lot of this is just sound business acumen.
Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.
San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or general congestion for even a minute.
fwiw, hiring senior talent in SF works just fine. If you pay at the right pricing tier. SF is a decent city. It could definitely do better, it has issues, but if we all could stop pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.
Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger companies)
What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly high , and then you combine that with half the twitter offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk of savings.
South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually more expensive than SF, though you do get a bit more for your money. Compensation is often marginally higher as well, though most companies with offices in both have them in the same salary band.
For senior engineers, I'd say opportunities weigh more than the difference in salary or even in overall package, unless the package correlates with the opportunities. I may complain about commute, but I'd still be happy to join an exciting startup in the city.
The Santana Row neighborhood ("Winchester Orchards") is pretty comparable, at $910/sf though. I was actually thinking of Mountain View & Sunnyvale, which are considered decent places to live in the South Bay but aren't quite as elite as Palo Alto. They are both about $1.2K/sf:
> but if we all could stop pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.
I’m very much not in the Valley or even the U.S. but I’ve seen a lot of videos and photos of SF streets being littered, about homelessness, drug use, something called bopping. Isn’t this real, or is it far less common than those videos make it out to be? Interested to hear this from people in SF.
There are a few very bad neighborhoods and the videos you are seeing accurately depict them. Most unfortunately, those bad parts are mixed into downtown where most offices are.
As a resident, it’s extremely disheartening and must be fixed. The Tenderloin has been bad for years, but fentanyl has taken it to the next level.
However, most neighborhoods are different. Most are free from encampments and open-air drug use. Many residents just avoid downtown and some aren’t wise to how bad it really is.
“You mentioned that bringing back nazis killed the site but curiously you did not at any point in any way imply that it is the world’s biggest platform… The argument you’re making solely in my head isn’t very consistent!”
I see. It is a response to an adept amalgamation of what was posted and could maybe have been posted but was not posted. This method of mixing real and theoretical posts makes sense when we introduce a dimensionality of posts that includes both observed and observab-
I find the word almost always reflects more poorly on the accuser than the accusee. Just a near meaningless curse word used with very little care or accuracy.
I find posting an old meme reflexively upon seeing the word “nazi” to be kind of odd. It is not clear what being able to ctrl-c ctrl-v an epic dunk accomplishes
I would imagine that people that are not extremists or lefties are comfortable calling e.g. Richard Spencer[0][1] a nazi, or self-proclaimed white nationalist Nick Fuentes[2][3] one.
There is a very small but very vocal subset of posters that would take this opportunity to weigh in on the latter as being mislabeled, though I have not taken up previous suggestions to deeply familiarize myself with his writings in order to disabuse myself of some perceived error in judgment.
I tend to keep scrolling when I see someone use a word in a way that I disagree with. In the case that I do feel compelled to correct someone I certainly don’t see the value in copy/pasting a vague insult about their sanity. That is, to me, a genuinely strange decision to make given so little stimulus.
Nazism is dead. There is no significant nazi organisation on this planet. Yes there are still white nationalists. Yes there are still anti-semites. This was also true before the Nazi party existed. And during its existence! If WWII commander General Patton of the US Army had a twitter account, it would probably have more of the above than both the accounts you linked.
So, I re-iterate. If you're unironically calling people Nazis in 2024, you're either a political extremist, not all there in the head, or completely ignorant of history. Often it seems to be a combination.
I think what we have here is a difference of values. I am not particularly precious about the word because definitions change over time with common usage.
The majority of people would understand, given context clues, what the phrase “the nazis ruining twitter” refers to. To those that were still confused, my examples of neo-nazi white nationalists with sizable followings (for example, the first one, who helped organize the Unite the Right rally[0]) should clear that up entirely. No one, literally no one at all would think that I meant that Herman Göring is retweeting Harambe memes.
The “are the nazis in the room with you?” joke isn’t really as much of an own as you might have thought. Instead of signaling “Get a load of this guy that thinks there’s ghosts in his computer!” you’ve kind of signaled “I would like to take this time to share with you all that, due to my specific and stubborn refusal to understand context clues or acknowledge that words can be used differently over time, whenever I see this particular word I can only envision a guy that thinks there’s ghosts in his computer! My mind can only summon the one image!”
I agree. This conversation began when you saw a word used online in a way that didn’t align with your strict and personal definition of it and exercised your better judgment to insult a stranger on the internet.
Here in India, it's a wide mystery why most startups prefer to headquarter in Bangalore. It made sense two decades ago but today there are several other Indian cities like Vizag, Nasik, Noida, Gurugram, Chandigarh, etc. which are more equipped, have better infrastructure and even lower cost of living. Still most folks prefer Bangalore just because it has been like that since ages and popularly called the "IT Hub". But logically, it doesn't make any sense at all!
It's a chicken & Egg problem. I run a startup in Pune, and we just don't get good developers here. We are open to remote, and most of the good candidates are in Bangalore.
Access to better schools is a factor in selecting a locality within the city but I don't think it has been a deciding factor in deciding the city itself.
Many cities including tier-2 cities have a variation of one of those "international" schools that parents seek and there's no significant difference in the quality of education between them.
Apart from the usual cycle of available talent + job opportunities, Bangalore has better weather and location wise it can attract talent from 4 states(these 4 states are major contributors to IT workforce compared to other states) while not being too far from place of origin.
better schools is not a factor at all. right out of college, or a little later most of the high quality engineers move to Bangalore because that's where the jobs already are. once people settle down a bit, they tend to be averse to move on average. it's network effect and sheer inertia. no one really wants it this way.
Nobody in their right mind would ever setup an office in Delhi or adjacent regions. The office politics alone should deter half of the people. The rest is taken care of by the increased crime rate, pollution and attitude of people.
Vizag, Kochi, Pune, Chandigarh etc are all much better cities. In both the kind of people they attract as well as the overall quality of developers.
> As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day.
The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).
MP and PA(not eastern) have a shortage. Santa Clara does not. It’s still pretty cheap to buy a house in SC compared to anywhere in the belt between San Mateo to Cupertino.
That seems reasonable - even if companies aren't moving based on where their employees are, employees are taking into account where the company is when they decide which jobs to take, and are probably more likely to leave a job if they find their commute too long.
They are moving to San Jose, which is a city. It may not be as cosmopolitan as SF (certainly not as compact) but the differences have narrowed some in the last decade or so. Not to mention that it has a larger population than SF.
I wonder if cheapish EVTOL travel might make a difference here. I.e. if CEOs effective travel time is reduced, does that affect headquarter location selection.
They seem unaware that a lot of SF based people go to the east bay.
But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either. Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight" kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for families. I happen to have two kids in SF.
Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF specifically is the expense.
SF is a great place for kids of all ages. But housing is indeed very expensive, as is childcare. Families in rent-controlled apartments who want more space without significantly higher expense don’t have a lot of options; several such families we know ended up moving out of the city (sometimes to elsewhere in Northern CA but often across the country to be closer to family). I don’t know anyone who moved because they thought their kids were having a bad time in the city.
off topic: do you have a name or a link for the paper referenced? My company just moved to a new office that's "coincidentally" closer to the CEO's house, and I'd love to send it to him.
> if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to Bentonville, AR. I can see why someone would move to NYC or SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for career development, but you have to be pretty committed to Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to Bentonville.
Walmart has always been headquartered in Bentonville, AR so that's a huge difference from the other examples here. People in well paying jobs move all the time though so it's not the commitment or strategic retention plan you seem to imply unless you think everyone in NY or CA is so pretentious that they couldn't believe that Walmart employees are worth poaching despite their IT and analytics department being bigger bigger than most tech companies.
I guess not everyone working at Walmart headquarters are in well paying jobs though.
Relocating wasn't such a big deal when most family models were single income and women were basically all slaves and would follow their husband without having any say on the matter. These day, any relocation involve a discussion between 2 parties on the merit of relocating and possibility of career development for both. It is much more difficult.
>Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so will their CEO.
You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.
While this is true, it's also funny to note that Apple was only founded in South Bay because Jobs and Wozniak wanted to be close to their families. There was already talent in the region, but the origin of that talent started the same way. Shockley (of Shockley Semiconductor and traitorous eight fame) moved the company from LA to South Bay to take care of his mother [1]. Silicon Valley is only Silicon Valley because of "I want to be with my parents" decisions.
Not relevant to any current actions by Twitter, but an interesting historical perspective is that it was very rare for a tech company to be in San Francisco.
Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.
When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.
When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.
The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.
> SF was overflowing with startups on every corner.
Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s?
I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:
In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.
While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and beyond.
So many startups in SF. Most dead now of course. The first round of post-money hiring at Twitter took a few of my coworkers.
There were launch parties in SF every week in the late 1990s. Often multiple per week. The startups coordinated to not conflict. It was a very active scene. The first wave ended in the early months of 2000. There were a few very slow years after that, but things were picking up again around the time of Twitter's 2006 launch (and 2007-2008 scaling).
We in SF didn't consider ourselves part of Silicon Valley back then, so that might be throwing off the search results. The relabelling came later, when the never-formally-defined scope of "Silicon Valley" expanded to include SF city (but still skipping the bedroom communities between the city and the Valley proper).
(Edit: sibling of GP is correct, SF was mostly internet and media startups, agencies, etc. The Valley got most of the hardware startups. Twitter was a descendant of Blogger/Odeo/Pyra/etc, so SF city was an entirely expected location)
historically there was a lot of media and some internet in sf. more interesting hardware type tech companies generally clustered in the south bay with some exceptions (oqo, sega).
twitter was notable because they put a big campus in midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to mind but there were countless others)
sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun or apple either.
Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both ways to work was not acceptable.
Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.
I don’t buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1 is money and reason 2 is talent pool.
I’ve had several meetings, either in Twitter office or around it, and the street scene is very bad in that part of SF. If the claim is that this is a motivation for the move, it certainly passes the sniff test for me.
I interviewed there around then, I remeber getting off at civic center bart station on my way in wondering to my self if I really want to do this commute everyday and what kind if effect it would have on me. Then I got the offer and was like, I'll figure it out hah. Sketchy mornings watching all the drug dealing happening hoping I wouldn't accidently look at the wrong person the wrong way or something.
It gets much much worse than that at night (even as early as 7pm) so it would be pretty valid to not want to be in that area and have to leave the office and take public transportation. I wouldn't want my spouse or child to have to walk through that den of hell at night... it's extremely sketchy. Check this out for example: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-RuONoqOeP/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
It is an easy mistake to make because Van Ness is a strange station to have been built. It’s past the point where the BART tracks turn towards Mission and is close enough to Civic Center to seem redundant; but I guess a ton of civic buildings are directly on Van Ness and it is a major North-South transit corridor.
I’d be willing to be good money you couldn’t take the bus out of the old X headquarters at 11pm for a month straight and not get robbed at least once. I got robbed twice in the 3 months I worked in the TL.
Survival skills are nice to have. But it's even nicer to live and work in a location where robbery isn't something that someone might reasonably experience twice in 3 months.
Of course, I left a job when my lunch got stolen twice in 3 months; well 3 times, but one time I brought leftover pizza in a pizza box, that's understandable. Taking leftovers in plastic is just rude... especially when my shift started at 4pm and everyone else was working normal hours, other than the overnight person whose shift started when mine left.
If I had been robbed because of the location of my job, I'd probably show up one more time, to return my stuff (assuming it wasn't stolen when I was robbed).
others may value personal safety (of themselves or their family) higher than you do. Twitter may not be optimizing for folks like yourself (you may be in the minority).
Ludicrous. You've conflated a preference for authenticity with wanting to be a victim of crime. Straw man much?
There's a lot to unpack about the attitudes in your comment. I hope you were just having a bad day, because otherwise: you're quick to judge, intolerant of different values, you scorn victims of crime, and you'll sacrifice intellectual integrity to score a cheap point.
Not to mention talk about "survival skills" as if that should be normal in a highly wealthy western country in a highly wealthy city. That's shit you talk about in developing countries.
I'm not blaming them for the crime, just their lack of understanding how the world works. If you want to understand poverty in america the only place to look is capital and americans' commitment to individual material comfort over all other values.
"Survival skill" is a matter of looking like a scary scumbag who's more trouble than he's worth to fuck with. I'm good at it, I size up the real scumbags like they're meat I'm going to chew up and spit out and I have the physical build to back it up. They cross the street to avoid me. But many people will just never have this "skill".
I used live in the Tenderloin and work in the Twitter building. My walk to work required me to be mindful of both stationary and recently minted poop in transit. This was in 2019.
That is a quite ironic statement considering that Twitter has been an integral part of modern social engineering to reprogram people into accepting and tolerating the intolerable and unacceptable.
So here we are, at a point where people not only self-censor, they will even get violently aggressive or simply will suppress speech or even the ability to read or hear what someone has said if it diverges from the cult rules that have been imposed on our whole civilization.
I used to live in the Tenderloin in late 90's early 00's. Nice affordable studio on Turk. There was always a diverse party going on during the day on the streets. Definitely had an old fashion skid-row vibe. Market street wasn't too bad then. Ah the memories.
It's exponentially worse now with fentanyl and meth plus now there are now social repercussions or consequences and you can steal to fund your habit with no consequences. It's a sick sad society that would allow this and not see it as an injustice to man. To not intervene is bad enough, but SF actively enables this crap by giving out cash (adult assistance program) and needles (without requiring them to turn in dirty needles). But the voters get what they vote for.. so I guess they want this. This is what it looks like now on 6th/7th and Market: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-RuONoqOeP/?utm_source=ig_web_c... it's always been bad, but this is insane. I took BART to Civic Center for concerts and bars many many nights and it was never like this until the pandemic. I blame all city leaders, voters, and SFPD for allowing this to continue unabated.
The way I see it, the main way in which the citizens of SF can fix it is by voting for something different, but they don't. So it certainly does seem like they find the status quo preferable to alternatives.
Before you jump to that conclusion you have to be sure that:
- such politician exist (politician is not where we humans shine)
- you believe the ones who claim they will fix it
- the one that you believe can fix it don’t come with values that you cannot accept (extreme example: “I’ll kill all homeless people. vote me!”
Given there are/were cities that are not in such decline and such a state, including SF itself, it definitely seems like there are politicians that can fix it.
The values conflict may be relevant. If, for example, you think it's critical to allow and facilitate your fellow man to become total enslavement to drugs that destroy their lives and health and eventually kill them, then I can get that you won't want to do anything to stop it, even if you have to live in squalor for that to be the case.
Not really. People have just deluded themselves into thinking that the current situation is somehow more humane than mandatory rehab and institutionalization.
But the citizens of SF can just stop electing local governments that fund this, yet they don't. I can certainly see how they contributed to causing the crisis (i.e. by electing people who caused it), but I don't see how they profit from it, unless the people in SF likes such conditions, which seems pretty weird, at least to me.
Exactly. The residents could vote to build more shelters or do something/anything realistic to solve the homeless issue (other than just giving them money/tents/needles), but if they build more homes then that increases the supply of homes which residents are fundamentally against. They don't want any new housing to ever be approved for any levels/neighborhoods because by restricting supply it pushes prices up.
That’s fair, I never visited the office. But if that was the only issue maybe they’d consider a different part of SF, which would be easier for current employees.
So you've been able to gauge life and the street scene in SF based on several meetings? That's super interesting. I would argue the Embarcadero is fairly nice and I live here, but what do I know.
Only visited for a few days for a conference, but I think if you live there you may have become desensitized to the situation. It's really really not normal to have all the stores boarded up and security guards at the entrance. It's really not normal to be outnumbered by fent addicts nodding off on the street. The worst vibes of any city i've ever been to in my life (Including many people would describe as shitholes). This is so messed up to everyone who hasn't been beaten into acceptance of it
My wife and I have lived in SF for over a decade and I go to the Fitness SF next door to this building at least twice a week these days. We can all play this game where we try to pretend that this area is really nice to people not from here.
But what that guy said was "the street scene is very bad in that part of SF." and he's dead right.
I love this city, but misleading people on the Internet is not right. Tell them the truth. I've lived here as long as I have because I think the benefits outweigh the pains. But not because there are no pains.
SF has had some cleaner parts - including north parts of Embarcadero, Presidio, etc. but the center and Market St. areas can be pretty scary to a person who's not used to it. As a large ugly dude, I didn't really feel _that_ threatened there, even if a bit uneasy, but I can only imagine how, for example, a woman would feel navigating it, especially at later hours...
I am nobody important living in rural middle of nowhere, but visited SF twice for work, and it was the most horrific city I have ever been to. I am a big man and didn't feel very safe.
About 20 years ago I was visiting SF for work and, in a moment of weakness, let someone else book me a hotel - they booked me into a rather rough hotel on Geary. When I got into a taxi at the airport the driver said "Do you really want to go there?".
I visited Fisherman’s Wharf last year after dark and it was pretty poorly lit and not that clean. Maybe for a company where employees are expected be “extremely hardcore” (i.e. long hours) that is a consideration.
(Although if you’re truly hardcore you don’t care what the street looks like, you sleep under your desk.)
This is disingenuous. Twitter is located in Civic Center, which is a different neighborhood. From the ferry building at the Embarcadero to Twitter HQ is about 1.8 miles away, or 3 BART stops.
Given the density of SF and how quickly spaces can change you cannot realistically compare the two.
Have you been to Twitter's SF site? It is a weird place, between super sketchy and plainly empty, what is missing is the peace of mind, definitely a valid reason to leave. It has all the downsides from being in the downtown, while none of the perks remain in today's SF.
Talent pool isn't a real issue for Twitter now, under Elon, I don't think they truly prioritize Twitter over any of his other companies, the mission is to keep Twitter's lights on, that is it, the website/app had basically stayed the same after he took over, what talents do they really need, I don't buy it.
I think it’s inaccurate to say that they don’t need talent to keep the lights on at Twitter. Maybe not a lot of new architectural development is happening, but you definitely need a lot of ops people that know what they’re doing to keep the lights on there.
Santa Clara-San Jose area is relatively still damn expensive. (Ask me how I know.)
Anywhere with an RTO mandate is a hard pass. If they want to treat their employees like children and waste my time and money on pointless commuting to feel in-control, then count me out.
Yeah, this has been tested every which way by now, the entire point of in-person work is to monitor employees. My manager told me outright that the only reason I can stay remote is, unlike most of the team, I didn't seem to "disappear" during 2020.
reading this as a mariner who works 2-4 months straight, on a ship, in deep sea, 12 hour work day, and no days off (working saturday and sunday).. lol you dont know how bad it really is..
I'm going to assume your work requires your physical presence on that ship, in the deep sea, though. My work, however, does not. Further, employers are, on the whole, cheap, and want to pack workers into as small a footprint as possible. (Literally, 4' or less.) I can build a better work environment at home, for under $1k.
"My [unrelated] job is worse" is not a logical reason for me to abstain from advocating for better work conditions for myself, where there is a possibility of better work conditions. I can dislike things about one tech job vs. another tech job while still appreciating that the conditions of either job probably far exceed that of a career I wouldn't like.
(And, I would also still default to advocating for sane worker's rights in your industry too, unless there is some compelling reason that working >8h/d, 7d/wk makes some sort of sense in your industry.)
Talent pool is downstream of the "flamebait reasons" though. Maybe they're not moving out of SF directly because of the high crime etc., they're moving out of SF because they can't attract talent in SF... but that may well be at least partly because of the high crime etc..
I've lived in high crime areas, and SF doesn't have the kind of high crime that would actually deter me. The monotony of a homogeneous population is enough to keep me away from the Bay for as long as I can; and I know plenty of other talented people that feel the same
I've lived all along the West Coast from Tijuana to Seattle. There is no place along this coast which I would call homogeneous except the Bay. I would challenge your locals statement, but at this point, I've wasted too much time on No True Scotsman fallacies for this lifetime.
Either way, my community was one of the last diverse communities to get priced out of the Bay (around the early 2010s). Yet, you can find my community in any other populated place along the west coast. The bay definitely has a diversity issue when it comes to interesting people.
The thing about being priced out is that it can only happen if you aren't a homeowner. If you are a homeowner (or in such a household), the same effect is making you more than $100k a year richer. So you just have to like living with your parents.
TBF, Elon has been running his other companies like he is running Twitter. Also, isn't it his prerogative to run his companies however he pleases as he is the CEO? If the shareholders are not happy with it, they can push him out.
You think the engineers at Tesla and SpaceX, who have created jaw dropping technical marvels, don’t respect themselves? I’m not saying Musk isn’t an asshole, I don’t know him. And I’m willing to guess you don’t either. But it’s real hard to argue that his companies haven’t done amazing engineering results.
Two companies where they make sure Elon just plays with the unplugged controls and keep the adults in charge (well, I guess they let him have the Cybertruck - with predictable results)
Not the case at Twitter
Still I probably wouldn't do the amount of overtime they require of workers at SpaceX and Tesla
Do you have any first hand (or even secondhand) knowledge of Elon's involvement in engineering at Tesla and SpaceX, or are we speaking strictly in terms of your imagination or projection what you think happens? Having watched a few long form interviews with Elon regarding the engineering and construction of Starship, I'm fairly confident he is involved in the engineering. But I haven't talked to actual SpaceX engineers, so discount that as you will.
With respect to Twitter, perhaps the engineers drawn to work there are interested in the future vision for the company and the engineering that such a vision will entail. Not to mention, even in its current state, it is a global social media company with 100s of millions of users that I'm certain presents interesting engineering challenges. What cutting edge, successful tech are you working on that makes you so willing to disparage the work of Twitter engineers as "not self respecting"?
It's nice to unpack the assumptions behind this (and gp) comments. You know, honestly, why I won't work for twitter in 2024? Or Tesla, or SpaceX. Because I don't respect myself enough as an engineer. Even if we assume I had the skill (which, for Twitter, I probably do; for the other two, unlikely), I don't care enough about developing technology to devote my life to it, I want to check out after a regular work day and go hang out with my wife or climb or play board games. Better - more engaged, at least - engineers can go work for Twitter.
Meh. Being unable to check out does not make one superior engineer. Persistent long hours are predictor of a lot of bugs and correlated with chaotic management. They are not actually correlated with some kind of greatness.
That sounds like a cope. I have worked with many engineers who delivered as high, or higher, quality and impact features at higher volume by working longer, because they cared more about technology and/or the product. And I've also seen the same person (myself included!) with drastically different output based mostly on time put in. The simplest case is people who have kids and now want to spend more time with them; for some people, like me, it's an interplay of hobbies and how interesting the project itself is. The productivity decreases, based mostly on time spent. Can they respect themselves more as engineers after that?
It even goes beyond the job, e.g. does one read research papers or code at home? That would usually make one a better engineer, but it's not great for work life balance.
Not a cope, genuine opinion. I have seen people who spent a lot of time in work long term and generally they were not all that productive. Meetings took longer, because their socialization needs were not met.
And when whole teams work long because management demands it, what you usually see is tired people wasting a lot of time.
Agree but it appears a sizeable amount of young men see themselves in him somehow and therefore idolize him. As long as he has that cult of personality, people will gladly accept the abuse for a chance to be near him.
Well, even if I subscribe to "every company under Elon's management is a shit show" (and I do), and I don't idolize him (I really don't), if I lived anywhere close and were in my 20s, I would consider joining for a year or two just for the lulz. Twitter is still insanely influential, so it would be fun to be behind the scenes. I also suspect that software engineers can still learn a lot there.
You appear to be describing a cult of personality. Cults exist. They're still cults. It takes perspective, common sense, and internal self-worth to not fall for such.
Maybe, but it's all relative. Isn't it not self respecting to be working for anyone making over say $2m a year? You're just contributing further to inequality to "get yours".
There are plenty of horrible people who are CEOs out there (and plenty of companies that do actual evil), I think you're grandising Musk a bit due to him being a public figure.
I can even see people going to SpaceX or xAI attracted by the kind of work they do, but Twitter? The company needs no unique skills. If you are good enough to work there, you can work at a hundred other well paying companies in very similar frontend/backend/infrastructure engineering roles.
I don't think Twitter was the turning point. I remember his public image really starting to sour after his spat with the divers who were trying to save those boys trapped in a cave in Thailand.
Totally forgot about this one, thanks for reminding me of this. I agree, the media really went after him for what he said and I can see that now, his public image took a huge hit because of it.
The fact that you are getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and well articulated opinion is an ironic confirmation of your point.
Liberalism isn't about shutting down opinions you disagree with, it's about keeping an open mind and engaging with opposing views. Demonizing Musk and downvoting any questions about this demonization is a sign of immature behavior.
It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.
I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue.
> https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.
> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.
I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.
A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.
during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside.
About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan there was a significant shooting. These things happen everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced that a more suburban location that forces people to drive would actually be any safer.
If by "everywhere" you mean "major megapolises with crime problems", then yes, everywhere. Otherwise, no, not everywhere, and yes, in a suburban location a chance of a shooting happening under your very office window is extremely low. Living/working in a megapolis has its advantages, but let's not paint over its downsides also. Criminals want the same advantages too.
I don't see how that's reasonable. What I'm interested in is how likely crime is to happen to me, personally, not how likely any given crime will happen in some radius to me.
People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.
That's the worst possible interpretation of what that comment said.
- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.
- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.
So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.
The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.
Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.
Because as the Zendesk example that started this pointed out, an entire building (probably multiple!) of people were affected by this incident. There was 1 victim. It's going to seem insignificant on a per capita basis. There's thousands of people impacted by it, and possible dozens in the immediate vicinity who could be suffering from ongoing trauma having witnessed it.
Crime is not random lottery. It is concentrated and specific to certain places and circumstances. Thus, pretending that it is a stochastic process that is well characterized by per capita number over the whole city, and that if more people move into a bedroom community 20 miles from you, you automatically become safer because per capita numbers decreased - is innumerate at best. If you are present where the crime is concentrated, you risk is high, regardless of how many people live 20 miles from you but still in the same administrative unit. This should be obvious but some people still insist on focusing exclusively on large-area per-capita numbers.
I don't think you're reading those numbers correctly. The highest crime per capita is in Alberque, New Mexico, the 32nd largest city in the US, and that list is literally the crime rates of the 100 most populated cities, not the 100 cities in the US with the most crime.
Which small cities, in your opinion, are more dangerous than, say, Albuquerque? How many chances, say, a high-tech professional has to regularly find oneself in such a city because his company offices are located there and they have no choice but to go there regularly?
It is reasonable. Many totalitarian governments hide crime statistics. Many badly run police forces discourage reporting certain types of crime, like theft or robbery, to not mess up their stats. Of course, at some crime level, the difference between the official picture and the reality becomes impossible to hide, but the pretense usually lasts much longer even if it's obvious how hollow it is. But yes, it is very rational for the government whose interests are detached from the interests of the citizens, to manipulate the data, and they frequently do.
There's no need to outlaw reporting crime. You simply don't do anything with reports and the problem solves itself. Shootings tend to still get reported, but there's little point to reporting less serious crime once it's established that no action is taken. To that end, crime statistics are pretty hard to use in a meaningful way.
Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime. You know, if the drug dealer missed.
Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.
Accidental victims are already included in the "per capita". If a drug dealer accidentally shoots someone, that is a crime and goes into the crime statistics.
So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.
If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.
"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."
I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.
The correct claim is not that per capita does not matter but that it alone does not provide you with adequate picture. Imagine a street where 100 people live, and there's a shoot-out there every day. Now imagine a mayor made an order, and another 100 people are forced to move and live on the same street now, and there's still a shoot-out there every day. Can you honestly say the quality of life on that street improved 2x, even though you still have the daily shootings as before, but it's now twice as crowded? I think something is missing in this picture if you make such a conclusion. Of course, per capita numbers show some part of the picture, but you need to see the other parts too.
What you could say, assuming the number of shooting victims per day remained constant, was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting. If you moved enough people onto that street, again assuming a no change in the number of victims, the likely-hood of any individual being shot could be forced into a statistically insignificant number.
The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
> was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting.
If shootings were randomly distributed by a mechanical process with uniform distribution among everybody who has the address registered on this street, it would be true. But that's not how shootings work. You confuse a simplifying assumption - that is made for the purposes of modeling, because it's impossible to model the life of every person - with actual reality of what is happening. What is happening is if there's a shootout every day on the street, and you live on that street, and you are a sane person, you would be afraid to go on that street, because the next person shot could be you. And that's the rational behavior, while "I don't care for the shots I hear, these numbers on screen say it's ok" is wildly irrational.
> If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
Again, no, because shootings aren't a random lottery allocated uniformly by independent metric, like an address. It's connected to your behavior, so if you go to the street where shootings happen, you risk being shot. And how many people are registered on the same street has very little to do with that.
> it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
And again, it would be, if we were dealing with uniform random distribution. That's not what actually happens - if 100 people live in a safe neighborhood and I have to walk the street where druggies hash out their quarrels - the averages are not going to help me. Remember, Bill Gates walks into a bar... how richer have you just become by sitting in that bar?
1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.
2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.
>
Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime
Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.
No it does not literally say that. It would if the crime were be allocated by a random uniform lottery to every person living in the city. That's not how the crime works.
Spent a week walking around SF and saw no crime. It felt extremely safe.
Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.
SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.
We recently spent a month in Tokyo. It is ridiculously safe and law-abiding. I'm surprised they have any crime at all. In our entire time there, I saw one (1) individual piece of small rubbish on the street.
Tokyo is not safe. People who are arrested for suspicion of crimes are held for weeks by the police and threatened and beaten and tortured until they confess, even if they are innocent. The police then release them for 24 hours and rearrest them on a different charge so the two month holding timer resets.
People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.
As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.
You're right of course, but it's sort of meaningless. I live in Germany where there isn't nearly as much gun crime, but Musk isn't about to move Twitter to Germany.
I saw a video of a German activist being hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day. Your country controls speech through force. Like I said, it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country.
Björn Höcke. Apparently the slogan "Alles für Deutschland" (Everything for Germany) is strictly verboten because a Nazi organization used it. I didn't know that before the Höcke verdict and I doubt most Germans did. I also very much doubt that it was in any way used as a Nazi reference.
Germany's penal code does ban certain non-specified symbols -- which makes a lot sense based on Germany's recent history. Unfortunately, the law is applied extremely selectively and in quite creative ways for opinions that some people just don't like.
Why does Germany pretend Die Linke (The Left -- the renamed East German Communist Party) is a perfectly normal and legal party and at the same time that the perfectly normal and legal (and not very much on the right) party AfD is quasi-Nazi?
That's a really surprising example. Paris has nearly identical crime level to San Francisco.
From personal experience, I did not feel particularly safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).
Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there. One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation, but it's very small and easy to avoid.
I think OP was referring to shootings. In France, as in most of Europe, it's not trivial to get access to guns. So the risk of getting shot in Paris is small, but of course you still might get stabbed.
I was talking only about shootings. But if we are comparing anecdotes regarding your example I happened to also live in one of these unsafe suburbs, and visiting LA, SF or Chicago and getting in the wrong neighborhood seemed order of magnitude less safe. Gangs are not armed, you don’t hear gunshots at night or people screaming in the city center, and you don’t encounter aggressive drug addicts. All of this never happened to me in decades in Paris but did in one trip to the these US cities.
Just another anecdote but I concur with you--10 years of commuting experience in the Bay Area tells me that the most likely bodily harm I will experience is behind the wheel on the freeway, not from homeless / mentally-ill people wandering the streets. I have been involved in two car accidents on 580 (not at fault) but zero bodily harm on BART.
Why would an individual living and working around some area care about the crime per population?
I would personally care way more about the crime density like per mile or something because that is what would actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would happen in close proximity to me that could put me in potential danger.
I couldn't care less about the crime per population.
This doesnt make sense. You care about "per population" because you are 1 out of the population. You don't care about per square mile because you are not measured in square miles, you are measured in people (1).
Higher rate per person means it is literally more likely to happen to you.
High rate per area but low rate per person means I guess that you're more likely to be a witness.
Low rate per area but high rate per person means you're likely to be a victim.
I am not only concerned about being a victim though. I don't want to be anywhere near it. I think I should be allowed to have that kind of a desire and preference.
I also think that whether or not you end up being a victim has a lot more to do than simply crimes per person.
I don't think whether you end up a victim is evenly distributed to every single person.
I think that the way you live and act and guard against things can affect your personal chances differently and that physical proximity can end up playing a role.
I have lived 39 years here in New Zealand and have never witnessed or been near a shooting. I'm not saying shootings have never happened in New Zealand, but the idea that these things "happen everywhere" is asinine.
I've lived in the Bay Area for 60 years, and never witnessed or been near a shooting. They do happen more often here, but violence is far lower than you would think from the media and online anecdotes.
San Francisco has nearly 8 times higher population density than Auckland.
Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system, attractive social services (compared to the rest of the US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
I don't think SF is an example of the place where the link between paying a lot of taxes and get the environment around improved is as obvious as you seem to imply.
Note though the reduction didn't come from anything getting in fact more efficient, but from "two companies donated materials and installation" - probably to quell the bad press. And it looks like $1.7m is still going to get spent, just maybe on two toilets instead of one.
The donated services and material was worth $425,000 [1]. The project costs came down on their own, meaning they never needed to be that high. It was an overestimate. If there wasn’t bad publicity then who knows if grift would have allowed it to stay too high or not, we’ll never know.
Where are you seeing the $1.7m is still getting spent?
Go ahead and complete the thought in the context of the comment I was replying to and review if your "dunk" is conflicting with the point I'm making...
Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax break, they will force you to come to the office because the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in seats and the employees will be forced to take on the non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent refunds during lockdowns because of this.
Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not that dangerous.
People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.
Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting danger. What really matters is average proximity to shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously, this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived danger.
Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.
On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.
Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between perception and reality. The reputation cities have is based on their perception and not necessarily reality.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.
> You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program
This is debatable. From what I've seen, increase of tough-on-crime policies and police presence does not make anything safer.
Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.
I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.
Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However, again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for the simple reason that the bullet can miss
>Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target
Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.
Here's more stats for perspective:
- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.
- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).
You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.
That's averaging the crime over the whole city into one statistic. The point here is not simply that the office is in SF, it's where it is in SF that matters.
I have a feeling you're including suicide in "gun violence" here which doesn't really make sense (suicide isn't violence regardless of your feelings about guns generally). I would also expect suicide by gun to be disproportionately higher in rural areas but I can't exactly articulate why I think that.
Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.
There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind suicide isn't always clear-cut.
What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.
Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.
[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]
---
There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.
These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.
Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation.
(Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)
"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)
This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.
If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.
>Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions
Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s
Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.
To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.
To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.
To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides being considered a firearm death. They are.
They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.
Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.
It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.
Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.
Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.
The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.
Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.
The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.
Note: “not that dangerous” means you will be confined in extremely stressful dangerous situations routinely. situations that, statistically, you and the frantic crowd will leave physically unscathed
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
> You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America.
Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.
If it is taken into consideration that a vast majority of gun deaths are suicides, that doesn't mean "the vast majority of gun deaths outside of <insert blue city>". Statistically the same proportion of gun deaths are suicides both in cities and out of cities.
Eh, but if the incentives are set to roll & experience the dangerous subset dice, does your commentarys subject and the commentaries audience really overlap.
SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.
Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.
Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.
And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.
The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.
These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.
> These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.
But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].
This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy of their solution is.
But what if you run out of air superiority and money to bribe those paying for this special party. And to have this is constant free adverisement for the right wingnuts..
I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.
In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.
That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there was a young black woman who was being detained for assaulting an asian lady.
Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr
For what it’s worth homeless people were having sex on the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as my office within half a year of me being there. I also got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to fight them regularly.
Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.
It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
> I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.
From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.
I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.
Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine dehumanization of these individuals. I’ve actually seen people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and throw away the key, I’m sure they’d do it in a heartbeat.
This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while simultaneously being against punishing anti social behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn’t feel safe to riders they will use personal transport instead. But the notion that some people may hold some responsibility for where they may be in life by their own decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if there were simply a boring Conservative alternative elections would have been blowouts against them.
As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.
I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.
Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.
Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.
Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think it's safe to say I don't find these situations necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist, which many of my neighbors are not.
Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.
Just thinking about the day-to-day elevated stress that this would generate makes me glad I will never live in a place like that. It is weird to read people trying to downplay it as if it is nothing.
Because being scared because one drug dealer shot another makes about as much sense statistically as being scared because there was a car accident outside the office. Actually less so since cars kill far more pedestrians than violent criminals.
Visited SF in the mid 90s, then again about 10 years ago, and the decline was real back then. Tents on the same streets we'd walked as tourists 20 years earlier. I can say the same with Paris as well. New York, not so much, actually.
Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
When I was at Spotify in the Warfield building, something similar happened, and we dropped behind the windows. Later that day, a can of pre-made Starbucks coffee someone left on their desk exploded from baking in the sun. Caused quite a scare.
I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.
Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships.
I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.
For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit.
After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.
> back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes
I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?
Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people.
Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.
This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.
Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
> This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes...of course, I e-bike
The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked
in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].
There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.
You don’t really need an e-bike to go from the Mission to SoMa as it is pretty flat. I don’t think it will take you much longer on a regular bike. But your statistic that you showed is a bit flawed as it includes people that commute from outside and into SF, hardly any of whom does so on bikes, so this methodology will always show bias against walking or rolling (I don’t know a better methodology, it is just something to keep in mind).
Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either walk, bike or take transit.
If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
> And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
My point is that 16 minutes is not a a reasonable estimate for the commute the vast majority will experience from the Mission to SoMa. 40 is a more reasonable estimate and is pretty close to the grandparent's estimate of 50 minutes.
I know from experience that walking would take much longer than 16 minutes as would taking transit.
The problem with bikes is, in sf if a driver kills you, as long as they don't flee the scene, they'll be let off with a talking to or maybe a ticket. I don't know a single former coworker who regularly bikes who hasn't been at minimum doored.
45 minutes from mission and 24 to south park is about right if you use bart; see my timeline above.
A typical worker will probably work closer to Market and they may even live in the Lower Mission where the buses are a bit faster and land further south. So I think 45 min from Mission to SoMa is closer to the worst case commute rather then the typical commute between Mission and SoMa. 30-40 min is probably your average transit rider, and 20-30 min for the lucky ones.
Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni anywhere is kind of foolish?
> I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community. Neither of us have really been affected by the business tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing / amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few places, making everywhere else worse until those schools close and then, where do those kids go?
Many issues, no leadership, just leavership: solving your problems by changing the community you live in, not by changing your community. This is fine, we have little choice.
In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out how to tell them without hurting their feelings or violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.
That said, most tech workers should be working remotely. But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we shall see how that all plays out.
Rainy "season" in SF? That's January, and the past few years even January had been pretty dry.
That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does wonders for washing away just about everything, including all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise) excrement.
Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes.
Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.
I think the point here is we are comparing Menlo Park best case scenario to the Mission worst case scenario.
If you live in the upper mission you can take the J Bart or the 14, and walk for 15 min from Mission or Market. In total this would be about 40-50 min. Or you could bike the whole way which would be around 20 min.
If you live in the lower mission (which I did) you can take the 12 which should take you there in 20 + 10 min walk. But you could bike there in about 15.
I actually worked a bit closer and could walk in 20 min, which I often did, and didn’t bother with buses.
It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise.
Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts...
They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.
There’s how much the company can take, and how much Elon thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company.
I thought the company would collapse after firing 80% of staff, and for a long time I kept arguing that Twitter was still in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff but didn't fall yet" phase where they were running on pure momentum. I must admit, as time goes by, it's harder and harder to argue that. I just can't believe that 80% of the company was really just not needed. Every company I've ever worked at was lean to the point where they almost couldn't get anything done due to lack of people. I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.
The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99% uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord, Platform Messaging APIs).
As time goes on though, and you go through incident review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation schedules pretty nice).
My sense (from both interviewing and working with them) is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they were people on the periphery associated with making Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week without it becoming all encompassing.
When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue crashed.
Musk took a bunch of outside money during the buyout so they're still reporting results to e.g. Fidelity and other debtholders. Hence why we broadly know that investors have lost >70% of their money: https://x.com/danprimack/status/1774456271871033823
They just announced an anti-trust lawsuit regarding what they say is a coordinated effort to remove advertisers from the site. Not advocating one way or the other as to the merits of the claim but an interesting development regarding the revenue drop you mentioned.
Companies have to be sensitive to the overton window of their customers. You make a mistake - it can be expensive. Let's ignore X/Twitter for a second - look at what happened to one of ABInBev's brands, Bud Light. They stepped outside that window and got smacked down pretty quickly.
I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate to his customers who they should do business with. I can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when interacting, particularly with (for the most part) completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies. But I'm looking forward to digging into the theory of law which suggests that vendors can regulate who/what type of business their customers do.
I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and, companies are really, really profit seeking - if there was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue, and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1 CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance. Their political views would be irrelevant.
The problem is - when all these trust and safety and advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
This lawsuit is ridiculous. If Twitter can sue companies for not advertising, can Tesla sue people for buying vehicles not made by Tesla? Can Google sue companies for advertising on Bing? Can Rivian sue Tesla buyers for not buying Rivians?
The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
Don't forget that 2022 was still a good time for tech with people recovering from COVID lockdowns. It's not really much of a surprise that they're back to pre-COVID income.
Aside from that, there's the lawsuit the sibling mentioned, plus the coordinated campaigns from groups like Media Matters and others attempting to scare advertisers away.
Those numbers don't mean anything. Revenue does not equal profit.
Tesla makes double what GM makes with a 1/3 of the revenue. Twitter was always a money loser. If they made $661M in revenue, but lost 700m, and now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits, i wouldn't call that a dramatic collapse but rather a dramatic revival.
Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
> now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits
> Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
Notably, the company does not release audited financials anymore. If the company were able to go from breakeven to netting 80% margins, great. But nobody should believe such a turnaround without evidence.
Separately, if the company were netting $320mm annually (using your hypothetical), AND we assign the P/E of best-in-class Meta (which is growing, not shrinking), the company would be worth $8B[1]. Under these generous assumptions, Musk has presided over a $36B (82%) destruction of value in under 2 years.
1 - That's not accounting for the outstanding debt used to finance the deal. Including that makes the value of the enterprise negative.
Not able to comment on the technical side, but for sure a lot people who got sacked were on moderation. Some countries like mine eventually lost all moderators specifically working for that country. And it does show in the amount of spam an unchecked racism etc, which is a big reason why many advertisers left.
From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.
Depends on your standards I guess. You could cut it down to one person and have a website running. As it stands if you look at most people's profiles when logged out you see tweets starting a couple years ago other than the pinned tweet. I haven't used it much since a bit before Elon took over but generally as I understand it's more buggy and spammy than before. If that's good enough, I guess you could say it's still trucking.
Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet. I figured Elon would slash things that people thought were important but actually weren't, and make it more efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective that's not important, which is a shame for us.
I think Twitter is down 60% in advertisers and 30% in users? Elon personality is part of it, but losing so many people handling community, clients, institutions… I am sure the company has lost most of its institutional knowledge.
> I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.
Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.
How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy lifters.
By "maintenance mode" you mean shipping more features per year than the pre-Elon Twitter? Remember, the pre-Elon Twitter was completely stagnant and seemingly unable to ship even the most desired features.
Musk has openly said many times he wants X to be an "everything app" and sees huge growth in its future. What makes you think he ever intended to put it in "maintenance mode"?
a) slowly lose to competitors as you can't keep up with increased demands in the space.
b) take on more and more existential risks
For a lot of companies, that is exactly what they want to do. Its called the exploit phase, I forgot what business lingo this came from. Do a practical feature freeze, cut costs to the max, and squeeze all the value out the product for as long as it lives. Informally known as enshittification. Its all about cost-cutting rather than market capture.
You can last a while though, especially because there aren't many changes so there's also less operational risk.
People always find a way to justify their existence. In sufficiently large companies you can find people whose job is to satisfy policies invented by other people in other departments. In one sense, they were all "needed" because of the domino effects of some policy created long ago.
But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it might be tough to see the difference from the outside.
80% was needed to grow the business. If Twitter chooses not to grow them it doesn't need those people. It only needs enough to keep the lights on.
If Twitter ever gets a competitor with some traction it'll be dead in months because it won't be able to react. It seems like new social networks aren't a thing any more though so it's probably quite safe.
Let's assume we can trust these numbers. The user count is not material for a site that has already scaled and monetized, so focus on the actual money changing hands.
That is obviously in decline but does alone not capture how much worse off the company is today than before the acquisition. In 2022, the company did $4.4B in revenue and had negligible debt. In 2023, the company possibly had debt service payments in the range of $1.2B for the year. If you back out the mandatory debt service, 2023 looks more like $2B in topline.
Put another way: Twitter 2022 was significantly more capital-efficient than Twitter 2024.
Similarly, one can run a simple model of the value of the company now. Once you include the $13B in outstanding debt, you will end up with a negative number.
The linked article doesn’t seem to say anything about growth in revenue numbers - but it does say overall revenue has dropped 50% since Musks takeover. The quarterly chart doesn’t look great either.
Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter, but the door has been opened and that seems like an unforced error.
This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I suspect, like other private equity investments, this will not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE playbook.
> Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU
Main thing I consume on X nowadays is space journalism. Plenty of big name space journalists seriously posting on X (e.g. Jeff Foust, Eric Berger). I had a look at Threads, I can't find any of that content, mostly just people posting silly memes and mind-numbingly misinformed takes on the topic, at best people just reposting stuff that you'll already find better coverage of on X.
> This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
I don't find much "toxic" on X. If you only read stuff posted by people you follow, and are selective in who you follow, you can have a pretty curated experience.
Don't forget the peak happened during COVID- where it is at now isn't really much different than where it was before, if the numbers are accurate anyway.
The brand was never not tainted. Twitter has long been known as one of the cesspools of the Internet, actively contributing to the degradation of the social fabric. It would be a great blessing if Elon did actually kill it the way his detractors predicted. Twitter delenda est.
Look at the revenues per quarter. It was growing in 2023, but declined in the first quarter of 2024, but I wouldn't say you can make conclusions for 2024 from one quarter.
No one is comparing year over year, there's been barely a year since the acquisition. I said the "arrow" over the latest few quarters was generally UP, in response to a mistaken argument that Twitter/X has collapsed. I am not trying to say Elon is great or something like that, I am making an observation of what the charts say, that's all. I don't know if the charts are 100% accurate, but I have no reason to doubt either... Why anything that may be positive about X is so controversial, even something as uncontroversial as the direction of an arrow on a damn graph? People seem to lose all rationality over this guy, what the hell is going on?! Do you actually have figures showing completely different results?? IF no, why all of a sudden people are so completely skeptical of it?! Sounds like discussions about climate change: someone shows a chart with temperatures way up, all of a sudden everyone is an expert and points out it was higher 60 million years ago or whatever, or the data cannot be fully trusted because they learned in high school that these are just estimates or other crap on the same vein. It's embarrassing for the human race.
The point has nothing to do with Elon. It's just the correct way to analyze revenue graphs due to seasonality. Whether or not X is "collapsing" isn't obvious from the graphs either, and I made no such claim. We'd need to know other things that aren't public, and it's probably too early to tell anyway. But it's incorrect to say that revenue is growing. It's down quarterly YoY, which is the only real meaningful way to look at it.
Further, everything after Musk bought it is just a guess. Without public audited numbers, who knows what is going on. If I had to bet, I would guess the numbers are even lower than estimated - if things were hunky dory, I doubt they would be suing their customers (advertisers).
If you're suing your customers? With frivolous lawsuits? You are admitting that your business is in collapse.
There's no mystery here. The company cut Trust & Safety so that people could post whatever they want under the guise of "free speech." This means more objectionable (to advertisers) content on the site. Advertisers do not want to run ads next to objectionable content.
Worse, Twitter was never big enough to really matter to big ad spenders. So it's small, doesn't have the ability to move the needle for any big advertiser, and now CMOs/ad agencies have to worry about their ads being run next to 4chan-quality posts? Easy decision to stop spending there. There's really no conspiracy involved here.
At base, this is a simple conflict of ideas. Twitter management wants to create a space where people can post ideas that may be broadly seen as objectionable, even if they are legal. Big advertisers are well-known for restricting their ads to more sanitized spaces (this practice predates the Internet). The goals of Twitter management are directly in conflict with the goals of big advertisers. This was the obvious way for this situation to unfold.
“ If you're a Twitter diehard who's not willing to swap to X, it might be finally time to ditch X for Mastadon or Threads. On your way out, don't forget to delete your X account.”
journalists are so biased against X
You're getting downvoted because you're just regurgitating the Elon Musk fanboy "journalists hate X because they're threatened by it!" and "journalists are biased and not trustworthy!" party line nonsense like a complete weirdo.
To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds like a reason they would want to reduce employee numbers, rather than a reason they wouldn't.
At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.
Terminating employees without cause (i.e. due to employee’s poor performance) entitles the employer to unemployment benefits, causing the state to increase the business’s unemployment insurance premiums.
If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, and hence the business’s unemployment insurance premiums are unaffected.
They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.
The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1], but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with.
[1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.
> American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition
Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.
If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.
But market rates are well known and well published. CCC class loans were 10% in April 2022 when these deals were likely. So 10% to 15% covers the possible range of loans if you know much about the market.
The higher end of 15% would be possible if the loans were finalized closer to May or June.
There is a big difference from Feb 2022 vs April 2022 though. But we know the rough timeline of Twitters acquisition as well as the rough timeline of when deals were signed. So I'm reasonably confident in an April 2022 deal.
Looks like when he took down the financing, rates would have been in the 12% range. Possible some/all of the debt has been rolled over since then, possibly at higher rates.
Yes, the debt weighs heavily around their neck. If it eventually ends up in bankruptcy, will Elon Musk lose control of his beloved x.com domain name for the second time?
I would imagine that it was set up so that it is rented from Musk (instead of owning* outright), but it's Musk so who knows.
* I know it's still not owned owned but there is still a legal difference between X Corp directly renting x.com (from Verisign) versus leasing x.com by a different owner (maybe Musk, maybe a holding corp) to X Corp.
That's not how a bankruptcy works. In a bankruptcy, the company is owned by the creditors and gets resolved by them. Usually a business will attempt to avoid bankruptcy by filing Chapter 11[1] or similar so they get to propose a plan for restructuring that will pay back the creditors over time, but their actions as debtor in posession are scrutinized by the US trustee to ensure they meet a fiduciary obligation to the debtors, and the debtors can file a court case to appeal both the chap 11 and can try to get the debtor kicked out and a trustee appointed if they aren't acting in their interests.
I will wager a box of donuts the like-hiding was due to some combination of politics and Musk’s embarrassment for being called out every time he liked some cringe porn-adjacent tweet.
The issue is the $13 Billion loans and estimated $1.3 Billion/year interest payments.
I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.
I actually don't think the removal of like views has anything to do with revenue.
I think they actually did this so users are free to like whatever they want without having to worry about getting vilified for liking something that is not supported by the majority. For example liking something political or anti whatever.
4Chan was run by like one guy using the change he found in the cushions of his couch.
Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.
I much prefer the Twitter of today. Since I'm a grown adult, I can handle some mean words being seen by my eyes, and just ignoring what I don't like. It's nice seeing a balance of both sides of an argument now, rather than only seeing the left biased information.
I was a big Reddit user back in 2015/16 and also spent a lot of time in the NPR comments. Watching the insanity around the 2016 election in real time was an interesting experience. The mass suppression on Reddit and NPR shutting their comment section down was enough to form my opinion on this whole thing.
That being said, I've enjoyed it since the takeover. It still seems very similar to what it used to be, but feels very much like I'm seeing it from both ends now. For every crazy right leaning comment there are plenty of crazy leftists that counter, and vice versa.
Is "left biased information" a euphemism for anything that doesn't include Nazi propaganda or hate speech? Because those are pretty much the things that were (loosely, not fully) banned prior to Elon's takeover.
"You and everyone like you should be rounded up and executed" is a just a mean message, but it's also dangerous. People will believe that stuff, and then try to do it. This isn't a theoretical danger, it has happened time and time again throughout history. These sorts of seductive messages that target out-groups and provide a sense of community have lead to real life horrors.
X has also gotten very bad about amplifying misinformation, especially on white supremacist topics. Just yesterday (maybe the day before?) that bullshit old paper that said sub-Saharan Africans had an average IQ of 55 made it to the top of the feed with no community notes. The comment section was full of great replacement theory blue check guys all agreeing with one another and making it sound like there was a consensus. People see stuff like this and actually believe it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Elon himself re-Xed it at some point.
> They should know better and the best have already left or been culled.
We should care, even if it's just a little. Some of them may not be able to leave for various reasons: health, family, immigration status, who knows.
Maybe if more of us showed a bit more empathy towards each other online, the Internet wouldn't be such a sociopathic cesspool. These are real people you're talking about, not inanimate objects.
Interesting question. Should have joined the Rebel Alliance, or at least actively worked to sabotage the Death Star. A little mis-solder here, a little wire pull there, and ...
Of course, I agree with you at the individual level.
However, at the macro level, I'm more than happy to see jobs destroyed at insert sh1tty company for the good of both individuals, and the good of the nation/world. Short term pain, long term gain. And don't tell me the workers X/twitter can't get re-hired or land on their feet elsewhere ... so actually, I'm not that sympathetic. Sometimes you have to take a stand.
And that sociopathic cesspool you're speaking of? ... yes, that's right, you could be talking about X/twitter.
So, I appreciate your words of empathy, they're much needed in these times. But I'll be the asshole who dismisses them on this occassion.
Most of the workers stuck at X are on H1B visas or similar, which require them to keep their job or immediately find new employment at a company that will sponsor them.
Active users on the site is setting records pretty regularly, according to Linda. Usability and performance of the site is far higher than before in my experience as well. Revenue is down only due to an illegal cartel boycott, which X has recently filed a lawsuit to resolve.
I've only seen the words "illegal cartel boycott" being used (verbatim, as it were) by Musk, as well as the Twitter account of something called Rumble who are apparently joining Musk in trying to sue the advertisers who left the platform in response to it becoming too volatile to associate their brands with.
Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?
Would it not be an expression of free speech and advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity, seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst, wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its previous consumers?
This take, which is taken straight from Elon, is plainly hilarious.
They claim to be the last bastion of free speech, but when advertisers exercise their free speech and go advertise someplace else, suddenly that's unacceptable.
Same way Elon goes on and on about how they won't moderate hate speech and will only ever delete content if it's illegal by law, 'cause "otherwise it'd be censorship". But then with the legal and publicly available information posted by ElonJet, that was different and everybody who ever mentioned it was banned.
>Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer of an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is not “free speech”.
This is squarely in conspiracy theory territory, but doesn't really justify the thought that association between any group of private entities could be compelled.
> You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
I think this may have been in reference to another commenter.
> You support censorship.
I literally have spent much of my career on teams trying to find technical workarounds to online censorship in dictatorial regimes. What Musk's Twitter stands for these days is closer to the censorship seen in those places than it was before Musk took over.
I'll also add that what the US Right often decries as censorship is... jarringly hypocritical, at best. I won't get started on here.
> This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.
Summarily incorrect. I don't know that there have been any high-profile bans since I joined, but HN does delete conversations where people who aren't constructively participating in the thread are. It wouldn't surprise me if this thread got removed, for example.
I'm not going to entertain your remaining points since those aren't really substantial enough to even talk about.
This is just another of Musk's "free speech for me, but not for you" lawsuits that never go anywhere and are designed to waste your money with lawyers.
I don't know if you are serious but because of LLMs trained on our work basically every tech company is scrambling for ways to get rid of programmers. Just yesterday I commented in a thread here where someone said 80% of their work is LLMable "bullshit" (somehow that guy, like many, didn't connect it to headcount or likelihood of keeping own job...)
Even if it wasn't for LLMs, it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API.
I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how rote their work is.
People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel like these tasks should've been automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
Lawyers or real engineers can only push a button and still have secure jobs because they have licenses/certifications/boards and liabilities with consequences. There is no such thing in programming. (Even though our mistakes can and do also lead to real people dying)
> it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API
That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.
> automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov regulation and taxi drivers all cheer for this because each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only for someone else not themselves:)
"Work" isn't Boolean — the self drive AI does exist, just not well enough to do everything and even the "F" (though the Waymo AI seems to be?)
The same quality may be worse or better in specific roles, but AI isn't stationary.
> It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling
No, but it is why the Amish and literal communism existed — but in the latter case, they weren't opposed to the automation itself just the unfairness of using profit to make workers redundant.
Unions are more about fair pay for fair work, and safe conditions in that work. Certifications are consumer protection.
Dunno much about the Amish. Communism was (in practice a power grab, but in theory) very much in favor of automation. Hyping LLM training without licensing original works and calling for banning copyright and patents is what reminds me of communism a lot these days. I saw someone call it "IP communism". Let's see how well it works for innovation;)
I am not against automation too. We all used autocomplete. But it is amusing to see people sawing off the branch on which they sit, encouraging each other to do so and spitting on people who point it out.
I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
> Certifications are consumer protection.
If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture. In the end it is protection for every side.
I've only seen half the stuff you're calling "IP communism", but many are inspired by the "fully automated luxury gay space communism" meme, so sure :)
> I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
I've met both, and yup; though the communists seemed more sociable, neither could really understand that the other existed except as caricature.
> If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture.
I was unsure if I should have written "also" in that sentence; but I didn't write "just" ;)
FWIW, I'm fairly sure the communists I know have a blind spot for all the failures of communist governments and not just the USSR's failures, they put Marx on a pedestal and insist the evidence to the contrary doesn't count somehow.
As I see equivalent blind spots in anarchocapitalism (any example of bad outcomes is dismissed as "not real free market"), that's why I don't think either communism or anarchocapitalism works.
I don't know what the established criteria are for 'reasonable commuting distance' in the SF Bay area, but seems like a big forced transfer like this might need a WARN act notice, which is going to get the company in the news for layoffs. And probably in the news for not providing the notice in a timely fashion, too.
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
From what I could tell, the 'standard' for reasonable commute measures from the employee's home, not from the original location to the other. But the federal WARN info says 'reasonable' varies by locale, and didn't offer any specifics.
Moving the office is probably neutral or better for people on the Penisula. And may be neutral for parts of the East Bay. Depends on where exactly in San Jose the new office is too.
Also, I was surprised by how light traffic was when I drove from Mountain View to SF last October during what I was expecting to be the morning rush hour. I don't recall what the reverse direction looked like, though.
But my point was kind of to raise the likelyhood that this action was taken without regard for how it looks, and without regard for required notifications.
Somehow I think the group of people who choose to live in SF have particular interests and desired amenities that make high rent worth it. E.g., walkable and lively neighborhoods, access to parks, events, etc.
> making fall promises that never come to fruition
That's definitely not consistent; the SpaceX stuff may be always behind his schedule, but it does actually deliver, and even those delays are ahead of the rest of the entire industry planet-wide; and those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist and are really electric (the sucess of electric cars over e.g. hydrogen wasn't a given even when he took over).
> those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist
Well, except the $30K Model 3, and the $35K CyberTruck (Musk can promise all he likes that it's coming next year, but I see it coming at all as a snowball's chance in hell).
SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla.
Directionally agreed though, he and his companies have achieved some really remarkable things. Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
> SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla
Neither of which matters; the SpaceX promises are still Musk's, and the pre-Musk Tesla was losing money on each sale (all <= 147 of them).
> Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
Agreed.
To me, colonising Mars has a huge romantic appeal… but there's no way I'd want to be in a disconnected space habitat with an (orbital position dependent) 6-30 month return-to-Earth delay, if he's in charge of it.
It's an exciting move by X! They seem to adapt to the changing work environment. I wonder how this relocation will impact their company culture and operations in the long run.
I have him blocked but the CEO has 200 million followers. Even assuming 20% are real people, I'd imagine there's quite a few of those who'd love to work at his company.
I know one Twitter guy who was a big Elon fan and loved the energy, right up until he got arbitrarily cut in one of the previous rounds of don't-call-them-layoffs.
Many people dislike their boss. I severely dislike Elon, but if they do move to the South Bay where I live and I happen to be out of a job, I'd entertain an offer from X.
So after naughty ol' Mr Car took over Twitter, but before I stopped using the site (this would probably have been around Oct 22), I started, after never having followed or interacted with him, getting multiple inane tweets from Musk in my feed every day, along with constant suggestions to follow him. So I blocked him (I think he was one of three people in 15 years on the site who I felt the need to block). I assume this is fairly common for Twitter users; can't imagine it's gotten _better_ since.
I mean, they did ask why block him. That's why; the site will bombard you with his stuff until you do, so if you don't like his particular brand of weird loser, well, what you gonna do?
Not following is for content you don't mind seeing, muting is for annoying friends you can't be screenshotted blocking, and blocking is for content you don't care.
I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately but even if not following him you can receive push notifications from his tweets. Tested this on multiple accounts now, he’s unavoidable unless blocked and sometimes not even then because of all the bootlicker accounts that screenshot and repost his tweets. Frankly it’s made the platform unusable to me, almost nothing he posts is interesting or worth reading.
A lot of scientists and journalists have not moved to other platforms. I tried to use instagram instead but the algorithmic injection of content and a terrible UI make it unusable for me.
I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content and almost no noise.
If you are a content creator on Twitch or YouTube you pretty are being held hostage on Twitter due to critical mass. Migrating would require a mass protest of large content creators to choose a new platform and move over all at once.
So my understanding is Elon reduced the algorithm's bubble effect - causing people to be exposed to contrarian content, content a person doesn't agree with, so that it would be witnessed by more people.
Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in bubbles?
Should a person with the most followers in the world have more people seeing, to then be able to know what they are sharing or saying, to then have more eyeballs to scrutinize them?
Should they have more or less eyeballs witnessing them, and responding to them?
I'd rather see what they are saying directly vs. seeing other articles about him that are most likely propaganda nowadays with how corrupted the media currently is, hence partly why ELon felt compelled to buy Twitter-X to begin with.
But fair enough, blocking him then could make sense.
I stopped using X because it was literally impossible to not see his posts.
/shrug
My partner has the same. …but, to be fair, who knows what different variants of the platform are given to different people in different regions at different times.
The timeline is just crazy, but from a financial stance it makes sense to leave the more expensive location, if you already have the space else where (ignoring that they didn't pay their rent in San Francisco anyway).
I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter, sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
Folks with H1B visas have an undue burden on any attempt to move jobs. Also interviewing is hell for many tech folks who are extremely introverted (myself included in that last part.)
Very true although anyone on a H1B may have to file a bunch of paperwork since their job location changed. Although I suppose the paperwork is going to be more something that twitter's attorneys need to do.
That depends on how many X employees actually live in SF and how many commute each day back and forth from the same South Bay. When I worked in SF, I regularly shared a train with the latter crowd, and there are a lot of them. I'm not saying they all work for X, but I suspect for a lot of people there the move would actually be an improvement.
Doubtful narrative. In a time when occupancy is going up you would not want to kick our your anchor. Having a large company like X can help boost the rest of the area.
Throw in any other factor and it fits. Another tenant already lined up, musk wanting to significantly reduce the space he was leasing (plausible, no?) or what have you. A slow commercial market might be the only reason it took as long as it did.
You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive
You don't say that 2020-2022 proves that remote work definitely is ok for a lot of people and they want it to stay that way. And recently there have been multiple reports showing that more flexible working options help lowering attribution. Well, what a surprise. /s It is clear that CEOs force people back to office mostly to cut headcounts.
Since a gross receipts tax hits anything other than small, local stores inconsistently, I'm not sure what behavior it's trying to drive. It also taxes revenue rather than income, so yes, it makes anything ulta-low margin like a payments platform DOA.
For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.
It doesn't matter, SF residents are so delusional and stockholmed i think they'll put up with literally anything. Even in this thread you have them acting like their city isn't a horrifying disaster to anyone not desensitized to it
My understanding is that that part of Market street never quite recovered from BART construction few decades back. That building was abandoned and was beautifully restored for Twitter HQ. I vividly remember it opening and then the neighborhood improving gradually. Sad for SF - the final blow to one of the few once optimistic and truly SF-based utopian social media companies…
More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional train system) with 2-3 transfers
Transit in the Bay Area has very fragmented governance: 27 different transit agencies for 7.6m people in 9 counties with little coordination and no regional vision. By most measures, the Bay Area has the most fragmented public transit network in the country. See Seamless Bay Area if you want to make your voice heard for fixing this: https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/
(Large tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple avoid all this by using private employee-only shuttles which take the freeway where possible).
BART from the East Bay is in the process of being extended to downtown SJ (latest estimate: "2036", they are still debating single-bore vs twin-bore tunnel, to save money in construction).
It's not fair to just blame BART vs Caltrain though, there are multiple cities that need to cooperate with other too: as we saw in the neverending saga of the CA High-Speed Rail project, people wanted a midpeninsula stop, but no midpeninsula city (Redwood City vs Palo Alto vs Mountain View) wanted to be the one to incur the increased traffic and enormous construction disruption from underground multistorey parking lots, so it was dropped.
You can get to San Jose on BART now but have to go all the way under and around the bay instead of directly south, so it’s not really worth it to go from SF to SJ using anything other than Caltrain.
You can take Caltrain to San Jose. I did this commute for several years when I lived in SF and worked in SJ. With electrification coming top Caltrain this fall, it should be faster than the current diesel trains. Depending on where Twitter's offices are in Palo Alto and San Jose, it probably won't be that bad.
BART runs with 20 minute headways on longer routes (and as little as 4 minutes through San Francisco). The six CalTrain "baby bullet" express trains run hourly at best, with long service lapses mid-day and in the late evenings. Locals run more often (about every 10--20 minutes during peak commute hours) but add a half-hour to the just over one-hour express schedule.
(Both are still faster by far than driving, particularly during rush hour.)
BART's Green Line (Daly City - Beryessa / North San Jose) departs every 20 minutes from 4:55 am though 7:36 pm (southbound) and 4:59 am through 6:49 pm (northbound):
I commuted for several years to Palo Alto from SF. If you manage to get on a "baby bullet" it was a 37 minute ride, but you also have to get to/from a Caltrain station on each end. In PA, I was lucky that the office was a few minute walk, but in SF it was a taxi or bus ride (this was pre-Uber etc).
As an X employee, if you had optimized your commute around the mid-market area, you could be living less than 45 minutes away on a single mode of public transit, but it could double or triple to commute to the new X offices. Any time you have a transfer with the commuter systems in the Bay Area, it's going to be a clusterfuck from time to time.
Are they upgrading the tracks as well? Diesel trains can run at 80mph no problem, which is about the maximum any standard US railroad supports. If the track is built to high speed standards you could go faster.
Melbourne, Australia has been running a project since 2015 – scheduled to continue until at least 2030 – to remove at-grade intersections (or "level crossings" as we call them) on suburban rail lines. They've already removed 83, and by 2030 plan to have removed 110. I'm not sure of the total cost, but I'd say in the ballpark of US$5-10 billion. The removal is done by a combination of elevating the rail line, trenching the rail line, and leaving the rail line at the same level but building road bridges over it – adopting whichever solution is most feasible and cost-effective for any given at-grade intersection. The project is run and paid for by the state government, with the federal government contributing some of the funding.
Australia's State of Victoria: population close to 7 million, economy almost US$300 billion (Gross State Product), annual state government budget around US$70 billion. California: population close to 40 million, economy almost US$4 trillion (GSP), annual state government budget of almost US$300 billion. If Victoria can afford it, California can too.
.. and being "close" to the occasional death: The inter-city CalTrain (the outside of the train) is used frequently by those amongst us who pursue suicide, and aside from that dropping a mini-nuke on society / friends + family, another side-effect is 2-3 hours of delay on CalTrain. Overall, a traumatic and unhealthy commute.
Living in SF and working in South Bay sucked for me, when I did that, for that reason in particular.
Until Boring Company sets up multiple pickup points with Loop and Hyperloop tunnels; then will arguably be a max 20-30 minute ride.
The dynamics of travel will dramatically change multiple industries, save for if the status quo establishment and industrial complexes through regulatory capture prevent the rapid expansion of the paradigm shift in transport that Boring Company is rapidly developing; the technology of which Elon needs for his Mars colony, and so it'll happen and be developed as far as is determined to be necessary to maximize its utility and safety.
I haven't looked into it recently, however their Las Vegas network is going and expanding; 40 million people per year travel to Vegas, a great testbed and for exposure.
I wouldn't bring up the Las Vegas network if you're trying to advocate for the boring company, it's quite possibly the worst system of transportation that's ever been created. A farce in every aspect, benefiting no one.
This is not the sort of thing you should measure on an individual user experience basis. Try running the numbers for the system, it would essentially get beaten by a medium-sized bus in capacity and times, at a fraction of the cost.
Not to mention the large delta between what was promised versus what was delivered. There's probably a good case for fraud, if it were not for the fact that the purchasers want to save face they could probably sue.
... Wait, is it actually _that_ low? That's, like, a high-frequency conventional bus route (ie not BRT). Like, what on earth was the point? Either use buses for same capacity, or build a real rail line for ten times the capacity. The highest capacity metro systems can do something like 40k/hour each direction (though one of those would clearly be overkill in this case, and something far more modest could be used).
Loop and Hyperloop are two completely different things. Loop is Tesla cars in a tunnel, and Hyperloop is theoretically capsules in evacuated tube. The former is not very good way to get around city, and the later is a not very good to get between cities.
"if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
The criticisms of TBC fall into three camps: (1) this is terrifyingly unsafe, if a vehicle catches fire in those tunnels the occupants can't even open the doors and no vehicle behind them has a way to safely evacuate either; (2) they are still really expensive, like all other tunnels; (3) this compared poorly with all other modes of transport on every measure.
Thanks for replying with some depth-specific concerns.
Okay, so perhaps the worst case scenario is only goods are shipped in the tunnels - taking all semi-trucks off the roads for at least the major long-haul routes?
All-or-nothing thinking without critically thinking or brainstorming through how adaptations for adoption could be made isn't helpful.
Re: Safety
Perhaps battery tech that eventually is safer than currently driving a vehicle, perhaps even safer then with the casualties from airplane crashes, or other solutions like before entering the tunnels everyone is provided emergency kit/safety-oxygen masks/goggles, etc; and maybe necessary for doors that have an emergency "blowout" handle to pull and have doors pop off their hinges? I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.
We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?
Also, in the Hyperloop almost vacuum state that's planned, fire will be less of a problem - and perhaps a safety system could be implemented, especially if everyone is temporarily given an oxygen mask-goggles for each longer ride or all rides, that at certain points a fire extinguishing-suppression system could be implemented where non-oxygen gases are flooded into the tunnel between the point a fire is detected?
Arguably so long as cost of implementation is less than or the same cost than current existing infrastructure costs, where the time savings are arguably up to invaluable - but a cost per ride for each person using the system will be determinable, then it can be a great alternative especially with the positives of how it allows transport regardless of winter weather conditions, etc.
> Okay, so perhaps the worst case scenario is only goods are shipped in the tunnels - taking all semi-trucks off the roads for at least the major long-haul routes?
So, in this scenario, you could only do that if each major long-haul route had a tunnel. And you made the tunnel wider, as the current tunnels — where the only cost-saving TBC has demonstrated of any kind so far is by limiting the size — aren't big enough to fit an American standard intermodal container, and only just fit the ISO containers (with so little margin you have to care about the turning circle even if you could fit the carrier into the circular gap around the boxy cross-section). And that's without also considering that current trucks definitely don't fit no matter which size standard is considered, so either you'd need the tunnels even wider or you'd need something custom-designed to fit.
High axle weights cause more damage to the surface, which is really bad for a tunnel where you can't just go around a pot-hole, so you want something hard-wearing, something like steel. Even if you use maglev, looking at current maglev research trains, you've got a speed-up zone where you still have contact.
But you don't need to cover the whole surface in steel, because unlike a road where the vehicles might move sideways, this is so tight that there's only one place for the wheels to even be. And if you do that, you could get rid of the batteries entirely by hooking these steel wheel-paths to the mains.
But then you can save money on the vacuum systems, because if you put all the ISO containers in a row: as each container will be in the slip-steam of the one ahead of it, a chain of 10 will have the same impact as a 10x reduction in air resistance.
Oh look, it's now either a railway or a subway depending on if you bother with the "underground" part.
> I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.
The pictures I've seen show negligible clearance between the bottom of the car doors and the curve of the wall. Also, I talked to a civil engineer.
But if you're talking about an evacuated tunnel, then leaving is lethal even if it's physically possible.
> We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?
Hyperloop in particular (as in, not just the tunnel) is about the speed, so it only makes sense to wait 30 minutes for security etc. if you can go sufficiently faster than a car would have. But is this a point-to-point system in a network that connects everywhere to everywhere else, like a road, or a hub-to-hub system? If it's the former, then those 30 minutes could've taken you 15 miles at residential speeds or 35 miles at motorway speeds (in the UK, I don't know US norms) — a delay like that means there's no point even trying to make it like the road network, so QED it will be hub-to-hub; but if it's hub-to-hub, you now also need to factor in the time it takes to get from wherever you are to your closest starting hub, and in reverse at the far end the time between your ultimate destination and its nearest finishing hub in addition to factoring in the delay for security.
But hub-to-hub can't replace all semi-trucks off the road — at least around here, they go to each supermarket, and I've got something like 8 supermarkets with articulated lorry loading bays within a 15 minute walk from my apartment.
Given the big-rigs aren't going away without an absurd degree of extra infrastructure build-out (never mind tunnelling, that kind of density is more like "raise city by 10 meters and rebrand old roads as 'hyperloop'"), if you're going to have a setup with hubs that far apart, why not just use a plane (for long distances, with security delays) or a train (for shorter distances, without the hassle of security)?
> Also, in the Hyperloop almost vacuum state that's planned, fire will be less of a problem
Not so, li-ion can undergo runaway thermal failure even in a total vacuum. And a vacuum is a great insulator, so that will stay hot for a long time. I'm having trouble finding how hot these get (the numbers are all over the place, and are in any case mostly about car fires), but the lower ranges are still in the "melt aluminium" range of temperatures. And if this is in the configuration where you take a car onto a pod or other travel vehicle, that's in the section with air anyway. If you can't take your car with you, it looks a lot like conventional public transport.
> Arguably so long as cost of implementation is less than or the same cost than current existing infrastructure costs, where the time savings are arguably up to invaluable - but a cost per ride for each person using the system will be determinable, then it can be a great alternative especially with the positives of how it allows transport regardless of winter weather conditions, etc.
Those conditionals are load-bearing.
The creation of a tunnel is generally more expensive than the same length of railway. Where land is expensive enough to make up the difference (e.g. old cities), or where terrain adds complications (go from one side of a mountain range to the other), tunnels are already used and quite often (but not always) rails are put in those tunnels — with a lot of safety considerations and backups for when things inevitably do go wrong, many of which can't work in an evacuated tunnel. TBC hasn't made any newsworthy dents to that price (sadly), all they've done to reduce costs is make the tunnels so narrow they barely fit a car.
Busses also reduce congestion on surface roads, just by having more people per square meter. Down-side is the same hub-to-hub consideration, up-side is flexibility when one route is unavailable for repairs.
For long distances where high speed is the critical issue, aircraft already exist. Extra cost-saving: no need to evacuate the tunnel, gravity already did it for you. And if you need to rapidly leave the evacuated section, not only do the oxygen masks drop, so does the plane — and, unlike in a tunnel emergency, this doesn't cause all the planes behind it to get stuck.
If weather is a critical issue, then you would need an everywhere-to-everywhere network, but as previously mentioned, that doesn't work with a 30-minute delay to get started — to give a concrete example, 30 minutes into my commute is when I get off the underground and walk the rest of the way to my office.
I like how the Vegas Loop tunnels are almost the same diameter as the London Underground deep lines. Glasgow subway is even smaller. Which means the tunnels are big enough to run metro and carry lots of people.
It would be better to use larger tunnel, buy normal sized trains, and keep tall people from hitting their heads. It would also make sense to use one of the automated systems instead of trying to build pod system.
It is also curious that Musk always want to do his way. Cause there is company that makes automated pods used at Heathrow. They should work for the current service and wouldn't be Tesla 3 with driver.
If it's not I encourage you to go look at the stellar success of the boring company in places like Las Vegas and reconsider your assessment of the future.
Because theres a snowball's chance in hell that will ever happen. Just build normal trains and expand the public transportation like every developed country on Earth.
Might as well argue he’s going to give all his employees time machines to go buy $AAPL in the 90s as part of their comp plan. Would also get downvoted.
"Extreme sycophancy without much critical thought."
A claim you make with no supportive arguments.
My comment is packed with critical thought. Maybe you're just lacking understanding to unpack it? Or are you too arrogant to not think that you know all?
And then ridiculous ad hominem that you think was clever enough to actually waste time to type out; what work do you have that you hate that you're procrastinating from working on?
I'm really curious if you know what sycophancy means, and if so, how exactly my comment is benefitting me? I think it's more likely you're jealous of Elon's success, have past trauma from personal work experiences you're projecting onto him, and taking it out on anyone who notes his successes and extrapolates to estimate where his projects will lead to.
This is a very anti-Musk thread and generally anti-Musk crowd. Pro-Musk comments should be expected to be downvoted, unfortunately. It's days like these one has to be brave and burn some magical internet karma points in order to present an opposing view and to call out the one-sided discussions.
I don't think the comment is being voted because it's "pro-Musk", but because no one believes they're going to do any of that. I even thought it was a joke, until they asked why they were being downvoted.
The true is, there's a huge gap between what was promised early on and what they seem to be able to do. After a certain point people start calling it "bs" and have no patience for those repeating the initial claims.
I'm imagining hordes of 20-something engineers living in the Mission with a 15 minute flat bicycle commute to the X office now having to grapple with getting to San Jose. Probably pretty rough news for a decent amount of people.
The Bay area is fairly constrained in terms of transportation. Commuting in a car is not possible (unless you enjoy deadlock traffic + paying for parking). Public transportation exists but only works on specific segments.
I would guess a large portion of the individuals in the SF office would live within SF/East bay and have a fairly reasonable commute going to the SF office. I am not sure how far Bart goes south now but typically you would take Caltrain so thats a 45min ride from SF to Palo Alto. Then tack on however long it takes you to get to Caltrain. Easily a 1hr commute.
People actually live everywhere in the Bay Area, and do every commute, and there is extensive mediocre transit in the South Bay. Commuting Santa Cruz into town, Livermore into town, every single suburb has people going to San Francisco, or to another suburb, or San Jose, or Oakland. In heavy traffic they are much longer than 1 hr apart, and the fastest train is 1hr 10min iirc.
San Jose is bigger than SF, and tech people tend to age out of the city and move south into the peninsula- so probably a good portion of the employees are getting an improved or neutral commute.
If they relocate engineers to Palo Alto, that's halfway between San Francisco and San Jose. And a lot of engineers (not necessarily at X but in general in Silicon Valley) live in the suburbs between SF and SJ already. It might be mildly less convenient for some, but also mildly more convenient for many.
Is the constant stream of flamebait (this action and other recent changes) helpful for twitter, or part of some larger strategy?
To me the service seems increasingly unreliable and unprofessional. Then again, I no longer feel like I'm the target audience. The numbers seem bad too; revenue was 22% down in 2023[1]. Also, "global active daily users of X via mobile apps had steadily declined during the year after Musk acquired the company, down 16% by September 2023"[2].
> Is the constant stream of flamebait helpful for twitter, or part of some larger strategy?
I don't think much thought was put into it, but I do think there will be a gradual numbing effect among the comments as people get bored of the criticism. Maybe very gradual though.
Edit: It just occurred to me that you might be referring to user posts on the platform being flamebait; my answer assumed that the action (moving the HQ) was perhaps flamebait, along with other recent changes.
Are these numbers that important when you're privately owned and slashing costs? I guess the motivators are different to a VC backed or publicly traded company.
To me it's still useful but I exclusively read it through lists. That way it's always chronological and only consists of tweets from selected accounts and retweets from other (usually interesting) people.
Musk’s tweets and the unimpeded use of the platform for misinformation and coordinated violence give me the impression that he cares less about turning it into a profitable enterprise and more about its use as a tool to push his agenda and affect the cultural and political changes he desires.
I find it surprising that this is a viable option.
I guess it always has been and it affects any media platform. Then again it’s easier to switch to a different radio station, or buy a different newspaper. In the context of a social media platform you are leaving your network.
No! It’s just bad management. There is not some secret 4D chess to discover here. A paranoid billionaire with a ketamine problem is running Twitter into the ground. I think Howard Hughes is becoming a more and more accurate model with time.
He said they want to move all the HQs to Texas, which implies they could still have offices in California just maybe smaller. This may be part of the plan.
They are also opening a new Palo Alto office for xAI where they could move a lot of engineering talent as well. Which is likely the other big reason.
There is a mile of difference between "person in the Army" and "West Point graduate." Also I want to clarify that the Master's Degree isn't like an online grift, it's really Stanford's graduate program (see link).
granted on the West Point part, but it was not very many years ago that Stanford did not even assign grades to class credits.. the vast majority of undergraduates were simply uniformly without flaw?
Way easier to recruit/attract talent in South bay. More senior/staff level engineers. SF talent pool trends more junior, more single, less experience, etc.
The drug use and homelessness are still pretty visible in downtown San Jose, or were when I lived there 2 years ago. Your personal tolerance level for it may be different from mine - I just treat it as a reality of city life, but my sister complained about it any time she visited because it made her feel actively unsafe.
Zoned for single-family housing or 1-2 story apartments mostly. There may be sidewalks (stroads) but almost everyone drives due to pedestrian accessibility issues.
Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair to say that some cities are more spread out and low density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.
I disagree. There are cities that are dense and cities that are spread out much more. See LA vs London, both count as cities, even though they are extremely different layout-wise.
I don't have time to watch your youtube, however it's not really a myth, just no longer true. There was definitely a long period of time when it was kind of true. I say kind of because it's specifically a diocesan cathedral.
While it's hard to make definitive statements about when a lot of cities originally became cities, it was first formalised in the 16th century, and at that time all the cities were cathedral towns (or more accurately, they were diocesan cathedrals meaning that churches in other towns in that diocese were administered by that cathedral), and significantly in many cases these cities were smaller than other towns in the diocese. The important part was that these particular towns with cathedrals that had always been called cities for as long as anyone remembered were recognised as cities by the Crown, and other towns were not allowed that status. Later on, Henry VIII created new dioceses and granted those towns (and they also all happened to have cathedrals) city status as well. So, at that time at least, there was a strong precedent that city status and being a diocesan cathedral town were linked, and in fact people were told that cities were cities because of this, even though technically towns became cities only by Royal decree and dioceses were only created by separate Royal decree, but historically both were done at the same time.
This understanding was only really challenged in the early 19th century, when some more towns with cathedrals became new dioceses and their local governments assumed they were now cities and renamed themselves as such. Clearly, the Crown wasn't too worried about this as it took nearly two decades for this to be noticed (and only happened in the context of a Royal visit to one of the cities), at which point there was an act of parliament specifically to confer city status on these new large towns that were already calling themselves cities, again reinforcing the people's understanding that towns with diocesan cathedrals should be called cities.
The interesting stuff happened at the end of the 19th century, when some of the other new diocesan towns that were quite small decided the also wanted the prestige of being a city, but were told they were too small to justify it and rightly complained that other cities were even smaller, but they weren't going to be downgraded to towns because they had always been called cities as long as anyone knew. And then Birmingham, the third largest town/city in the country petitioned to be a city on the basis of its important, and was recognised, at which point the link between city and cathedral was broken down. After that, a few more large towns also successfully petitioned for city status based on size or historical importance.
It can be said that the link between city status and cathedrals was firmly broken in 1974, when all existing cities lost their city status, and towns had to apply for city status along with justifications. This was re-granted to all the existing cities (actually, I've got a vague recollection that at least one didn't bother and lost its city status), and at the same time city boundaries were redefined to include the metropolitan areas that would previously have been considered towns or villages in their own right.
So, in one sense the assertion that towns with cathedrals are cities isn't quite true, and is definitely wrong now, but about hundreds of years this was actually the case. Arguably, correlation doesn't imply causation, but the Crown seemingly made an effort for a long time to ensure that the correlation held to ensure the set of cities was exactly identical to the set of diocesan cathedral towns. So, it's also not a myth.
> the video I've posted goes into great detail, but you'd know that if you had watched it.
Firstly, I'm sure you could have worked out that "your youtube" was shorthand for "the youtube video that you linked to". Had you even mentioned that it was a Map Men video, I might even have decided to watch it even though I was short on time at the time, but as it was, I just had 5-10 minutes spare before I had something else I needed to do so I didn't even click on it. But even if I had clicked on it, I wouldn't have had time to watch it at the time.
Anyway, I finally found the time to watch it (somehow I missed it even though I've been subscribed to the channel a long time), and it basically agrees with all the points I made, but in a much more interesting way and with additional information. I'm not sure that the tone "you'd know that if you had watched it" was really required, given that nothing that I'd written was contradicted by it, and I didn't really learn anything significant from it that I would have added to my post.
So really, the only thing you're arguing about is the definition of myth. And to me something that used to be true but now isn't doesn't qualify it as a myth [1] [2]. I said exactly that in my post. You'll notice if you re-watched the video you posted, that they also don't ever call it a myth, they say that it is wrong, and later clarify that it used to be true: "So why then do so many people think it's about cathedrals? Because it used to be."
> It is a myth that the former definition of what counts as a "city" still applies to this day, yes.
So no, it's still not a myth, it's just incorrect.
[1] For example "carrots make you see better in the dark" is a myth because it is wildly held, is wrong and has never been correct. Likewise, "the moon is made of cheese". However, "Trump is the president of the USA" is not a myth - it was once correct, but now isn't as he's now just "a president of the USA". Someone in 1920 who'd missed the recent news and said "Women are not allowed to vote in the UK" wouldn't have been repeating a myth, just saying something that was factually incorrect.
[2] I checked a number of dictionaries to make sure before writing this, and while most support a meaning like "a widely held but false belief or idea" when you delve into that in more detail, most dictionaries seem to have the view that a myth has no actual basis in fact, so something having previously been true and now no longer true doesn't seem to fall into the myth category.
It was a bit of an imitation of NYC at the peak of the pre-COVID boom, but I travel to both regularly, NYC has 100x more energy than SF. SF is akin to cities like Austin or Denver, we’re talking a city with only an 800k population.
Aside from how you define “pleasant” there is a considerable vibe difference, SF feels more cosmopolitan and SJ more metropolitan. No judgement either way, pros and cons to both.
> They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true. [0]
In SJ, you usually have a car door separating the homeless from you. Seems like SJ is more car-oriented in design; driving in SF is really awful and if I lived there I'd avoid it
If I had to summarize: SJ -> boring, lots of jobs with great variety, easier to avoid riffraff; SF -> cooler (in character and temperature), grittier, more loud politically
Personally, if I could get a cushy corporate job in SF I'd just live there. But it seems like that's becoming harder
After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.
There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.
If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.
From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.
I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.
But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.
China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).
The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)
San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)
Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.
The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.
The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the geometric complexity of their boundary.
yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.
Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.
According to my friend, Tesla engineering didn't move to Texas, and he doesn't want to give up the California weather, so unlikely to make the move. If you have a routine, and enjoy year-long pretty nice weather, California will just have a natural advantage.
I wonder why the author omitted Musk's stated motive for the move. Wouldn't that be of interest to the reader? Like, why do this? I also notice your explanation has been censored.
I lived for about 12 months in telegraph hill (got lucky with a solid apartment). I had my wife and 1 year old son.
Despite it being a really nice and affluent neighborhood, there was a weekly mugging outside my house. Any packages or items left outside were basically taken if left out for more than 1 hour. My neighbor’s car parked in front of the house was stolen, taken for a joyride and left in a random part of the city.
On top of that the schools were bottom of the stack in terms of scholastic achievement compared to where i grew up (upstate ny).
Bottomline, when you have a family you don’t have the luxury of tolerating political nonsense at the cost of elevated risk. Moved out.
Only things I miss is the natural beauty and outdoors of California, and the technical community. Nothing like it elsewhere.
Question from someone who doesn't know the SF neighborhoods...
Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
Reason I'm asking: the East Coast city where I currently live isn't great for software startups, and, on top of some crazy downsides of this city, there's a possibly emerging new downside: panhandler demographics shifting more towards angry 20yo men who use borderline mugging approaches, very brazenly.
Ideal for me in tech work is what I'll call "mostly-WFH-in-town", where people get most of the WFH flexibility goodness, but can also easily meet up for in-person high-bandwidth focused collaboration, personalizing, working on hardware, etc. So I'd probably want a concentration of potential colleagues who also like mostly-WFH-in-town. So I'm wondering whether SF is that place.
Zillow searches for modern apartments in parts of SF proper look more attractive, for the same money, as places in my city.
But I don't know the SF neighborhoods, and I don't know how representative are the SF stories about stepping over needles on the sidewalk all the time, finding poo on your doorstep every morning, frequent casual break-ins, etc.
Socioeconomic diversity, social justice, and safety nets are great, and preferred. Excessive poo, and other hazards, aren't.
When you walk most places, the sidewalk environment matters even more than if you're usually insulated in either a building or a car.
> Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
From a pure cost, POV you burn most of your money on rent and food. When we had visitors, I had to plan out my budget to cover meals for everyone. I remember paying >$80 for a decent bagels+coffee breakfast for me, my wife and her parents.
In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
Otherwise is it's a wonderful place. If I was a single guy, I'd love the vibe, the people, and the opportunity. If your in a WFH situation then I'd suggest just trying it out for 6 to 12 months. The experience will be great either way.
Other place id recommend is the Folsom near Sacremento. It's ~1 hour to lake tahoe and lots of nature to enjoy there. Very suburban WFH tolerant with roughly 50% of the rental cost
> You need to be on high alert all the time. Otherwise is it's a wonderful place
That must do a number on your nervous system long term. I live in NYC where I'm on high alert in specific areas at specific times that amount to maybe 30% of my time outside home and office. Otherwise I'm earbuds in enjoying something, or staring into the middle distance processing something on my mind. Both feel essential to my mental health.
> In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
Are we talking only about having basic city street savvy (e.g., you're perceived as a savvy native rather than easy pickings, can spot the usual threats and risks without trying, and can avoid or handle them)?
Or more like someone who has that basic street savvy, but who is also feeling like they found themselves in a rougher neighborhood at the moment (e.g., getting closer to military head on a swivel mode, and looking to not spend more time there than necessary)?
Don’t live in SF, but was a frequent visitor. During the day you’ll be fine if you don’t look like a dumb tourist and mind your own business. Some of SF’s main cultural attractions are in “rough” neighbourhoods like Chinatown. As night falls and the street life thins out, you probably don’t want to wander the areas like the tenderloin or most dark red places on this map: https://gisgeography.com/san-francisco-crime-map/ but even the vast majority of the crime there is petty. You’re still unlikely to be a victim of violent crime, but the chances are higher that you’ll be assaulted by somebody desperate for a fix.
The actual violent crime rates in SF are still below the national average, but the drug issues are just very, very visible.
I don’t know where the original poster is from, but I am kind of scratching my head at their comment. There is basically nowhere in SF I would have the slightest bit of fear walking around with the exceptions of bayview / hunters point or sunnydale.
Holy shit i feel bad for SF folks. It's crazy how you've normalized:
>In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
do you not realize this is really bad and not some reality of the world? Just the terrible city you live in?
I've lived car free in SF for 12 years it's very walkable! Just start out in the mission for max socializing and transit access and then you can live somewhere else when you've gotten to know the city.
You can take bike share and the bus everywhere, housing is expensive but less so than nyc!
The new startup ecosystem in SF (including Ycombinator itself) has moved to the Dogpatch and Mission Bay area (https://maps.app.goo.gl/62FCMHEQWsMD2yHq7) of SF. You will not encounter needles here. I never even see any homeless here. It doesn't really "feel" like SF, but it is very walkable and bikeable. It is very clean.
I think a 1 bedroom apartment rent would be around $3500 now (and all of the buildings here are fairly new)
> Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
yes-ish
In SF generally the areas are the most car dependent and the hilliest are also the quietest and have the least amount of bullshit.
SOMA, where you see a majority of those modern apartments, is going to have some of the worst problems. You get what you pay for in the city. Every part of the city is going to have some kind of street problem, but some, like Bernal for example, have them very rarely. It entirely is neighborhood dependent and there's tradeoffs.
Maybe you get a quiet apartment, but it's at the top of a hill. Do you want to walk up that every day?
The easiest way to tell is just to show up and walk around the whole city, it's only 7x7 so you can literally spend a weekend walking around and see all of it and make your own conclusions. Certain places change completely within a few blocks.
e.g. you can go from the Tenderloin which is easily one of the worst parts of the city to the yuppie paradise of Hayes Valley in like three or four blocks.
Edit: in terms of cost? prob 2-4k in monthlies for a good studio/one bed.
The rest is up to your budgeting, eating out and anything in the service economy is very expensive compared to the rest of the country. Including places like NYC.
Very few affordable places survive here, regardless of their quality.
I'd say you could tack on like another 1-2k a month as a single person and be pretty happy with the amount of things you're doing, plus some grocery cost depending on how much you cook for yourself.
8th and Mission is a lot different than 4th and Mission that's for sure.
I actually work up near that area and would still say you'll have interesting characters, but not something like 8th and Mission where I feel terrible for everyone who runs a business around there.
Most new apartment buildings I saw for my move a few years ago were concentrated around the civic center + market area.
Regardless of what people say here, walking around is the most effective way of ensuring that you're comfortable with where you are planning on being.
While SF is a nice place to visit, but the sheer numbers of unreasonable, lemming-like people who will spend and do anything to cling to live there as some sort of Promised Land™ make it a hellish place to try to live a sustainable life for almost everyone who isn't already a multimillionaire. Keeping a car parked in SF to as far south as San Mateo on the street is a recipe for catalytic converter theft.
Visit the de Young museum's observation tower. It has a spectacular vantage point. The other things California have are: less annoying creepy crawlies, more variety of scenery and microclimates, weather, food, and relatively cheaper property taxes.
California is massive though, and I would argue there is nothing in the rest of California that resembles the Bay even a little bit. Redding is nothing like the Bay; Joshua Tree is nothing like the Bay; Orange County is nothing like the Bay; Big Bear is nothing like the Bay. None of those regions are anything like the other, too. Hell, the difference inside 10 miles of Los Angeles is enormous. Compare Venice Beach to East LA for example.
Absolutely. There is variety in CA. Unfortunately, there aren't many safe and economical places to live and too many rich people gentrifying everything that was good. LA is a s-hole requires driving in absurd and crazy traffic because it's purposely spread out and its public transportation is terrible.
Did you ever try the peninsula, like Palo Alto? Crazy expensive if you want a free standing house but condos and townhouses aren’t too bad (relatively) and always felt safe when I was there.
I wasn’t making very much actually and we were a single income household. We wanted to look into buying a house but it was north of 850k for a closet sized space. Rent+food basically ate up all my income.
Moving to Palo Alto was definitively not in the cards
Telegraph Hill is one of the most touristy parts of the city, hence lots of crime (especially at night). It might be pretty but you just chose poorly / naively if safety was a priority.
Raising a kid in SF is definitely tough, but places in the Sunset have yards, and there are some top-notch schools e.g. Lowell High School, UHS, Lick, etc.
A lot of tech people come from out of town and don’t take any time to adjust to the fact that SF has very distinct neighborhoods. Many will just draw high salaries and gravitate towards whatever is popular / flashy without considering the consequences.
Actually due to a confluence of events the place we chose was the best deal we found. The decision was based on cost (not trendiness)
Regarding schools, school catchment is based on an esoteric lottery system loosely related to the area you place you live. If you have money, there are ways to game the system but otherwise it’s a low probability roll of the dice that you get a good school. Also, I didn’t have money
Also, Day cares generally have a waitlist that starts before children are born.
It’s interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit their priors.
Correct me if i'm wrong but that's haight ashbury right? The famous magnet for druggies and general sh*theads? Why is this being help up as an example of a safe place?
I think you either replied to the wrong comment or are maybe confused. Telegraph Hill is quite far from Haight Ashbury (as much as anything can be far apart in a 7x7 mile city).
I didn't make my comment in a vacuum. Look at the context. Notice we aren't talking about rape, or financial ponzi schemes. Context clues people, context clues.
I think the prevailing attitude is more like, "Yes, crime is a function of inequality, but it's also a function of X, Y, Z other things, and leaving them out does more harm than good to the discourse."
In an unequal society the crime could just be in the areas of high poverty because the government chooses to avoid improving those areas. Off the top of my head that's just one way to interpret "Crime is a function of inequality."
I can't read that paywalled article, but from the sounds of the abstract, no methodology is introduced to demonstrate causation. Any correlation that does not in turn show causation is spurious.
Do you have more info? Would be great if you explain how they do demonstrate causality. Not really sure why it is on me to refute a paywalled article that has no indication of being relevant. Please note that the OC who posted the link to the study (and to whom I was responding) specifically said "correlated".
I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it to recover.
> But you don't think that will change with the executive order from newson to remove homeless camps?
I don't remember there being homeless camps on Market but maybe I missed them. I saw them in other places around SF though. So unless there's more to it I don't expect just cleaning up the homeless camps to be enough to fix SF.
> Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just magically move?
How much talent does x/twitter require? Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft have 20-30-50-100 different products each, some of those products with 50-100 teams for different parts of the product. X seems like it has 1 product with 4-ish features. Posts, Ads, Video, Direct Messages. Is there more?
I saw a guy get shot on Mission and 6th after picking a fight with the car in front of him at the light. Lucky for him, there was an ambulance already on the block loading up a tweaked out junkie.
There are plenty of people who have no problem working from the office 5 days a week, and even some who prefer it. On HN some people are vocal about insisting on remote work, but outside the bubble here people aren't so adamant. Your average person would prefer remote, but isn't going to refuse a job offer based only on that one factor.
I have always had mixed feelings about silicon valley expanding into San Francisco -- I felt there was a strong negative impact, though to some degree SF acted as a honey pot for those just interested in money.
I wonder if this will be a harbinger of a retreat or shrinking of the size of the overall "tech" sector, or if it will remain a one-off. I guess that when the blockchain and ai bubbles really burst we'll see. They have a higher concentration up there for some reason.
I recently learned about Elon showing up to a Sacramento datacenter on Dec 22 2022 and personally moving server racks out of the datacenter, when his employees said it would take 6 months.
"Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at X, formerly Twitter"
"Musk took to the social media platform to announce that X would relocate to Austin, Texas, due to his fury over a California transgender protection law." What happened with going to Texas?
I mean it makes lots of sense. I'm in South Bay and the amount of vacant corporate buildings around here is ridiculous. The property prices have to be falling through the floor. Lots of companies substantially downsized their footprint during covid as they're now either partially or completely work from home places now, meaning they need a lot fewer seats in the office.
Why assume everyone is living in SF? I can’t imagine Elon actually asking his employees and taking there opinions into account, but my experience is that people are commuting in every direction in the Bay Area. This will be closer for some people without a doubt.
Does any employer factor this in? That's the employee's time/expense, not the company's. After all, SF is one of the cities with the worst traffic (to say nothing of the cost of living)
I mean, it does matter, and also HackerNews is the only bubble I interact with regularly that still holds on to the Twitter name like gollum and the one ring.
My understanding is that HN has rules against editorialization of headlines. This absolutely qualifies. The company is called X, the article calls it X. You don't have to like it, you don't have to use that name when you speak about the company, but editorializing the headline to name the company whatever the submitter wants is inappropriate.
"X" feels (to me) much more ambiguous than "Twitter".
If you say "Twitter", people know what you're talking about. If you say "X", are you talking about "X" marks the spot? Rated "X"? "X" the former project name for Paypal? "X" as in an unknown quantity? "X" is used in a lot of different contexts. I think if you want to use the name "X", then you should probably say "The company, X,".
Twitter is a verb, but when you use it as a noun, the listener instantly knows that you are talking about the company "Twitter". Plus, it's the name we are all familiar with.
I think there's a lot of variance between the different groups people here are part of and the different conventions they follow. That's broadly the case with HN actually.
Both names are linkbait. I think 'Twitter' is less misleading than 'X', so it wins the guideline on points.
Not saying it's a strong case, just that it tilts that way. Others would call it differently and that's always the case with a close call.
Just because you buy something doesn't mean you get to change popular usage by decree. There's a whiff of corporatism about that which sticks in my craw.
(I am not, god help us, making any implicit point about the muskwars.)
Well now that you mention it, the Twitter -> X, Facebook -> Meta, and Google -> Alphabet transitions are all kind of similar aren't they. I never noticed that before!
Those are distinctions without a difference in popular usage. Alphabet may own Waymo but in most people's minds (or at least in my mind) it's all one thing and the name of that one thing is Google. Similarly for FB and Twitter. You can change a name on paper but that doesn't determine how people talk.
There's another interesting aspect: the original names Google/Facebook/Twitter are so much more expressive than Alphabet/Meta/X. The latter feel like constructs of some imperious baron on his march up the abstraction ladder, leaving the rest of us cold.
I understand this is HN and many here love SF so can you explain to me how or why a company would want to have a physical location in downtown SF? It is expensive, higher tax, more regulations, all of which are often hated by a pure capitalist corporation. With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.
IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is looking for.
SF offices are a leftover of the low interest rate cycle. It's ok when you can borrow money cheaply as a form of status symbol for your company, but it makes no sense when companies have to watch every dollar and actually turn a profit - especially with the growth of remote work.
I expect that companies will maintain bay area offices for investor relations and small teams of the absolute top talent, but do most hiring elsewhere over the years.
> Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.
That’s the status quo until they rescind that as well. The companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up in 2024.
Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote work requires good communication hygiene in the company, hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct back-channels, now you can degrade systematic communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO on those grounds.
And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a perk of upper management, “as it should be”.
And I’ll just preemptively jump in and nip this in the bud before some HNer writes their anti-RTO manifesto in the replies:
Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.
Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.
There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.
Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.
And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.
I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.
I've recently gone full time remote - mainly to be closer to family - and all I can say is thank goodness I'm near the end of my career. I vastly prefer hybrid - being in the office for a couple of days at least allows for networking, face time and serendipitous opportunities. There is no way I would be where I am today if I had always been working full time remote. I simply would not have had the opportunities to cross paths with people.
And yet just today I read an article about how more than half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year ago. It’s possible some of the RTO push was to get people to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or reason behind their decision making.
It is an attractive location for young people that want to live in SF instead of the boring burbs. Downtown has a ton of food options for lunch. You can walk over to a Giants game or to the waterfront. Union Square in particular has turned into something of a trash heap, but FiDi to the north and SOMA to the south are (mostly) attractive.
It is easily accessible for anyone on BART or Muni lines so you may not need to own a car.
Outside of that, it's still a flex to have a downtown SF office. This isn't just for warm feelings, it can affect fundraising and talent attraction.
And currently, office prices are super low in SF. My company is paying about 1/5th of the price (literally) for the top floor of a building compared to a company that rents the floor below them (which signed a 5 year lease in 2019).
There are a lot of very readily apparent reasons you are apparently ignoring as to why your company got a much lower rent rate than someone who signed in 2019.
Seriously - the ability for people to ignore multiple, rather large elephants in the room is hilarious.
Moving out of SF may be the correct choice, but most engineers I know who have moved out of CA to cheaper cost of living areas have regretted their decision for one reason or another. Better taxes on paper may not translate to a better talent pool.
The benefit of locating to e.g. SF or New York is probably mostly social, to the capitalist and ruling class.
I think you want to be close to the top of the pyramid.
A CTO I worked for at a small startup said that they "don't go far from their golf club". But since Bill Gates and Steve Jeversson turned up I guess it is about being where it happens rather than being litteraly by their golf club.
Musk seems to want the remaining Twitter employees to be in the office, and San Jose fits the lifestyle profile of those remaining much better than San Francisco does.
Musk might be coaching all his moves on twitter in political terms but to me the from the looks of it twitter was extremely bloated and wasting money. And Musk is doing his best to get out ahead on the money he spend to buy it. And as far as I can tell he will get out ahead. If Trump wins the presidency again I think he might get out ahead huge
I like that. San Francisco is a dirty city with bazillions of homeless people and woke activists living in their bubble.
It’s insane what happened to this once beautiful place.
Twitter was given a famously sweet deal by the city to occupy that troubled stretch of Market St. In the time I lived nearby (until the pandemic) the area never really improved. San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities, no just that it largely allows them, but that it allows them in and around the busiest and most publicly-utilized transit hubs and the city center.
> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities
When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to give these people something so they don't have to live in tents.
Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?
I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending. Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play by the rules.
1 billion dollars / 8500[1] homeless people = 117 thousand dollars. The median household income in SF is 119 thousand[2]. I get that you wouldn't want to just pay them a salary because of second-order effects, but that kind of spend without even getting them sheltered strongly suggests resources are not being allocated well.
If you gave them $117K a year they would be dead within a month ODing on the mass quantities of drugs they can now afford.
Money is not the issue with homelessness, and until people get that out of their heads the problem will not be solved.
I think it's mainly corruption. A significant amount of budget (hundreds of millions) is allocated to "deal" with homelessness in SF, so efforts to actually solve the problem are going to face significant challenges from existing beneficiaries.
If the problem were literally that "these people want houses and just can't afford them," I think that'd work. But that's not the issue in San Francisco.
> the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people.
That will never work in SF because it involves moving the homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to a singular place.
So the homeless “advocates” will accuse you of being a Nazi who is trying to create a literal concentration camp.
It doesn’t matter how nice the community is, nor that the people would own their space, nor anything else about your plan.
As a meta-consideration, part of the problem is that many of people who work “for” the homeless really enjoy living in SF. Threatening to move their jobs to someplace less desirable is the reason they will call you names.
Also, if you fix homeless, you no longer need homeless advocates. That goes to the core of their identity, so of course they will fight you.
But why are the homeless "advocates" such a force? Don't the rest of the people living and voting in the city outnumber them by multiple orders of magnitude?
In politics generally, there's much more incentive for a small interest group to lobby[1] or advocate for a policy that provides a concentrated benefit to the group, than there is for the whole population to fight back to eliminate the small per-capita cost of the policy to the population. Also, many of the voters in SF have at least progressive sympathies, which include not "oppressing" groups that are seen to be "oppressed", even if they happen to break the law or make life unpleasant. So lots of money is spent in an ineffective but superficially compassionate way.
[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.
Sounds like the sympathies of the majority of the voters play a significant role, and not only the "advocates", as the other commenter suggested. Or at least as I understood it.
That probably works when people have no money and no place to go.
I used to live near Portland OR, and in that case many or most choose to be there, they wanted drugs and ANY house they lived in would soon be trashed.
The people of SF think that solving the problem as you have described, relocating the street junkies into cheap homes in the outskirts, is "literally fascism" because "how dare you tell these people they're not allowed to camp and shoot up heroin anywhere they like?"
I imagine most in the US would be more interested in reducing homelessness by producing soylent green than by producing housing - especially the billionaires.
The number of people in the comments blaming homelessness solely on homeless people is embarrassing. Sure, mental health, the economy, drug use, and housing costs have no effect, apparently.
It allows them because of a court case that said they can't take them down unless they can provide shelter, and they've refused to build enough shelter space.
The supreme court invalidated that decision, and so now they are allowed to tear the tent cities down again without having to actually find people shelter space. I imagine a lot of these encampments are going to be torn down (which will just cause them to relocate until they end up at a place where no one cares).
San Francisco was ignoring this problem for at least 10 years before that judgement happened.
Not to mention the issue there wasn't exactly that the city was trying to do something but the fact that they were fining them and plaintiffs claimed the fines were so large that they were "cruel and unusual punishment" which is non-constitutional.
So no, it's 100% political and bureaucratic apathy over many years, not one court case.
I recall seeing some stories years ago was that one issue with Twitter (and most Bay area tech companies at the time) was that due to the presence of an on campus cafeteria, surrounding areas never got much benefit from Twitter's presence.
That is, workers would show up to the building, and then essentially never leave (and spend money at nearby businesses) until the day was over and they went home.
Yes, that's how politicians and activists are shifting blame from their lack of interest in solving the issue to sacrificial goats.
The streets are full of homeless and drugged out people? That's not the reason restaurants are failing, it's the tech bro's cafeteria!
The house prices are sky high? It's not single house zoning and politicians blocking any house building, it's the rich tech bros gentrifying your neighborhood!
Remove them. It is an abuse of the commons that creates a vicious cycle that will only exacerbate the problem. And for your next question, San Fran already spends $141k per year per homeless person. That’s 7x LA. It isn’t working because of the lack of accountability and oversight in the use of those funds and San Fran’s lax (even favorable treatment) of public drug use, public camping, and general lawlessness. Send them to a shelter, treatment, or jail. “Harm reduction” doesn’t work. Full stop.
Freakonomics have done some interesting coverage of the opioid epidemic and how spending more money on it doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. Having listened to what different people say about it, I'm not so sure that "harm reduction doesn't work" is something I can agree with. Addiction and homelessness just aren't trivial problems to solve. Sending people to jail sure doesn't help anything, does it?
That being said, seeing it first hand is pretty shocking for sure. We stayed a couple of blocks from Tenderloin a few weeks ago and at one point drove down a side street that was just full of people doing meth (I think). Whatever SF is doing, it sure seems like it needs a course change.
For starters, tents shouldn't be allowed in the downtown area, which is the heart of business, shopping and tourism in San Francisco. It is one of the most expensive areas to live, so just like most residents cannot afford to live there, it is only fair that homeless people don't live there as well.
You might be right when it comes to employees, but definitely not when it comes to users.
There's a lot of people using X, and the vast, vast majority of them don't care much for Musk or actively dislike him.
THe problem with X is that it is (and always was) sort of an echo chamber, there's no average X user, everybody sees very different content based on what they follow. The average HNer probably won't notice the huge swathes of people who are on there just for sports content or their favorite celebrity. Those people usually don't care much for Musk, except when he appears in some funny meme.
Im there for finance news and compiler tech. It’s the only platform where I don’t feel like I am force fed Hollywood drama. You just have to follow people you respect instead of people you find amusing.
Twitter has always skewed older, in terms of not having kids on it, but it's still mostly people in their 20s and 30s. And there's far less 50+ yr olds in 2024 than FB according to statista:
Twitters largest demo is 25-34yr olds = 36%, 18-24 = 34.2%. While 50+ yr = 7%
16-28 is the gold of demographics. all those numbers skew A LOT to the lower end of the age range to pretend they have that demographic when in reality they do not.
Echo chamber might not be the right word, but most people are/were on Twitter for a relatively narrow usecase. You joined Twitter for Fortnite content, or for web development, or for local stuff. It's why these groups were described as "media twitter" or "Black twitter" or 'NBA twitter"
Musk pumps himself to the top though; I neither follow or click on his messages, but they still plop in my notifications. Further yes, for some reason people still use it so I have to as well or I sell nothing. However, if it would collapse or have Not Musk, it might be better. We will see eventually.
I'm only on Twitter for Sport, but deranged political content tends to infect even that more regularly, so i finally bite the bullet and gave my data to Zuck through Instagram where I don't have to read conspiracy on athletes I actually like.
when you stop dwelling on the random hot yoga posts while scrolling, after an ad scroll by, they will pump it up to other engagement content to feed the pavlovian cycle.
My consumption isn't high enough, I often look up at the interesting sport stories of the week, maybe a dozen post every day during the Olympics, but I used to use Twitter once a month to follow the NBA stories (hopefully it will work on Instagram, else I will end up subscribing to a real sport news media).
It’s not like this anymore I think. I destroyed my Twitter account way before the acquisition by Musk.
But I recently created a disposable account because it happens that my regional train lines have hired good community managers and so I know I can reach them. Otherwise I just never use it.
Since I subscribed to basically nothing, I’ve got the full algorithm version. It’s frankly horrible. I’m submerged by far right content and civilization wars.
It’s perfect for my social media addiction because it make me want to leave as soon as I finished what I had to do but it really feels like an unsafe place for anyone who somehow still have some mental health left.
I imagine that people with more suscriptions are seeing less of this shit but I wouldn’t be so sure and also, I personally wouldn’t tolerate to use a platform with such dysfunctional moderation.
Used to always be an echo chamber, that’s true. Yet the amount of alt-right, post-facts, no-vax, conspiracy theory shit I’m served on X despite me not following any of that has increased dramatically to the point of making X a cesspool of toxic content.
Most of that is spewed or retweeted by Musk himself
I'm not a fan, I don't follow him, I just have my timeline on "Following" and almost never see any Elon content unless I look for it. I follow a small carefully curated list of people and still get value from the site.
My brother's weird friend, who I don't associate with much, says Twitter is still great for porn. If/when they pull a Tumblr will be the start of their irrelevancy,
It's great for people to advertise porn and sexual services. It's not very great at monetising them. Most of it is just teasers for OnlyFans et al and more personal services.
It is the same thing. Not political, but as far as I know the previous guy didn't whine as much about free speech while not being free speech as the current guy.
Also free speech in law just means you can’t be prosecuted to say stupid things. It doesn’t mean that anyone owes you the canal to say your stupid things.
The previous twitter had (somehow) moderation. You would think what you want about it but you were free to use your free speech right elsewhere.
The difference is that Musk says that it gives you this canal but he lies because he is still moderating the network, except the moderation now favors far right content.
That’s not more free speech than before, that’s just a pro-fascist moderation.
Free speech is both an ideal, and something which is guaranteed by law (in some countries anyways). As a matter of law, you're correct. If you aren't prosecuted for your speech, then the law of free speech wasn't violated. But extralegal actions can still be (and often are) contrary to the ideal of free speech and are criticized on that basis. It is common, but erroneous, to conflate these two senses of "free speech".
Which "wrong think" specifically got people banned? Because the vast majority of conservatives on the platform did not get banned, so I'm left wondering which exact people banned for what exact reasons you're thinking of. Trump was removed after the Jan 6 assault on the capital for provoking that violence and repeatedly lying to his followers about the election, which, weirdly, is quite different than for being a conservative.
Getting banned for wrongthink on the old Twitter was a rite of passage, almost every content creator I follow (mostly gaming youtubers, nothing spicy or even controversial) got banned at least once.
What you quoted here and the article you linked are extremely different things. The article states "referring to a transgender individual by their biological sex and opining that “women aren’t men.”". You may not agree with that decision, but I hope you can understand that difference.
I might've linked a different story than the one I thought of — was a result of a quick google search, sorry.
The tweet I've seen wasn't directed at anyone, just a sentence to the effect of "Women are different from men". By a feminist, so likely not a conservative.
Harassing a trans person is terrible behavior, sure. Like with any other person. (I.e. that's not a wrongthink issue.)
From where I'm standing, it looks like when Dorsey was CEO, leftist accounts got more leniency and were more likely to not be banned after being reported for offenses—be them legitimate or not; this was the opposite for accounts on the other end of the spectrum. When Musk took over, this phenomenon was completely and totally inverted. IMO.
Text-based hivemind social media like Twitter auto-excludes likes of Trump and Musk. They don't generate text in the Internet sub-language. Twitter users judge, cancel and ignore liberals and conservatives equally hard, I think largely by presentation.
The difference is that Twitter didn’t ban conservatives for their political views but for violating their terms of service. In Trump’s case that was continued calls for violence and election interference, more than a hypothetical concern after his followers made an unprecedented violent attack on the U.S. electoral process. As you can easily verify, most conservatives were never banned: the people who were banned made repeated, deliberate violations of the legal agreement that they accepted.
They did not ban Trump for "continued calls for violence and election interference".
Look at the two Tweets they used as a justification of his ban [1]
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
And
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Of course, in the blog post, Twitter claims to have "assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy"
If those two tweets are glorification of violence, then your post is calling for genocide.
Again, if those were all he’d posted and his followers hadn’t just responded to his past calls with a violent assault on the election process, he’d never have gotten banned. As you can see by reading the page you linked, this decision was made with that context in mind after years of crossing the boundaries, and they did not want their corporate resources potentially being used for additional political violence.
The problem is their claim was those two tweets were violent. If they just said they banned him for behavior outside of Twitter they wouldn't be lying. Instead they claimed two tweets that have literally nothing to do with violence are violent.
Look, we all know you’re making that up but if we take you at face value, you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act. Nobody got blocked for advocating for smaller government, business-friendly policies, or talking about their religious or family values – it was threats of violence, slurs, targeted harassment, election misinformation, etc. None of the conservatives I know would claim those as defining their beliefs, and they’d be rather insulted to have you define them that way.
Surely you can provide specific details of this alleged censorship? It was heavily covered here but even pretty conservative people didn’t see it living up to the PR claims.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was all anyone was talking about for days. They blocked non-consensual nudity but that’s consistent with long-running policy and had no impact on the political aspects any more than we needed to see Trump and Daniels in action to discuss whether payoffs were appropriate.
> you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act.
This sort of disingenuous reply really isn’t helpful. The GP was clearly accusing Twitter of enforcing their TOS for righty accounts, while not enforcing their TOS when lefty accounts would do similar things.
I don’t think they are correct, but your rhetoric is just going to alienate people and makes your argument look weaker.
Can you provide any examples? The poster rather has been rather conspicuously unable to do so, which is hard to reconcile with the broad policy they’re claiming, especially when there are counter examples of accounts which were not blocked because Twitter gave more leeway to political accounts.
The reason is simple: the things which got those accounts closed weren’t traditional conservative positions, and there were plenty of lefty/hard to classify accounts which were also suspended or banned for similar reasons but nobody is sticking up for their behavior and claiming it represents their larger political group.
Dude, you realize we can see the timestamps of your messages? You’re replying to a message left 4 hours ago claiming that something you wrote 2 hours later somehow contradicts it.
Now, as to that specific claim since you actually provided details we can see that it doesn’t support the claim. It’s a single account, not the imagined campaign account conservatives, and Twitter changed their policy around hacked materials specifically to allow what the NYPost did:
Again, nobody is saying that Twitter was perfect but there just isn’t evidence supporting the belief that they ran a discrimination campaign against conservatives. Even the much ballyhooed “Twitter Files” fizzled because it made it clear that they bent over backwards accommodating political figures.
Yeah, I think the current phrase for this is "delulu".
I give you an example but apparently its not the example you wanted. You expect me to list every right wing account that got pulled? The Babylon Bee got banned as well if that helps you get a grip on reality.
The twitter files never fizzled out, except in the NYT. This is just your unfounded assertion. They were literally a smoking gun.
Twitter took 14 days to change their policy re the Hunter Laptop to slow roll the story breaking fully before the presidential election.
And if those "Terms of Service" heavily aligns with left-wing ideology? Do we then finally concede that Twitter did, in fact, target or disproportionately affect non-left-wing users? Is our next point of discussion about whether we can allow such a huge societal discussion/debate tool to be aligned with a pre-defined set of principles that 50% of people don't agree with? Or rather, on a set of principles that we can't find more than 50% consensus on?
Either way, this is just like normal government laws. One of the big criticisms that Libertarians have over laws is that they're not universally enforced, so they end up being selectively enforced, which just means that "those with power" wield the laws against those they don't like. Same goes here with platforms like Twitter. The rules are vague, opaque, and their enforcement is seemingly random and at the whims of some faceless entity behind their enforcement process. If we all knew these supposed "terms of service" and they did, in fact, have very clear rules and guidelines then there would be absolutely no room for conservatives or anyone else to cry about being targeted.
> And if those "Terms of Service" heavily aligns with left-wing ideology?
First, they don’t - if they had, you would be able to provide an example rather than confabulating about imaginary scenarios.
Second, private companies are generally not obligated to provide you services on your own terms. If a bar kicks you out from screaming threats at other patrons, your rights are not being violated - go find a place which welcomes you.
Third, it’s not 50%, although I can understand why you’d make that up, but a fraction of a percent. Almost all conservatives were not banned because they didn’t repeatedly violate the terms of service. The ones who were kicked out were given warnings, chose to ignore them, and had the promised consequences.
But even if, as you argue, calling for violence against people is part of right wing ideology or culture, it still seems reasonable to prohibit that. We do have to draw a line somewhere even against things that may be ingrained in a particular culture and which may have a disproportionate effect on that culture.
But we should examine these choices in a principled way. Still, prohibiting calls for violence doesn’t seem like a gray area…
I will not use calls for violence as an example for this argument I'm making. I specifically left it vague so we could all apply our own minds on it.
But if i had to pick one it would be the Trans issue. Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates on this topic meant the platforms usually sided with the trans or left-wing party.
As for calls of violence: there are many examples where anti-white and anti-right calls for violence and extermination go unpunished and swept under the rug to be memory holed. Let's start by making this a bad thing across the board.
The entire doc has an "aura" of being fair, and "protecting" the weak. But it ends up stifling debate and genuine discussion because report-brigades and coordinated attacks by left-wing institutions and left-wing activists (with way too much time on their hands because they are full-time activists) end up targeting right-wing individuals for benign and not-harassing behaviour. I've seen my fair share of anti-white and anti-republican hateful comments and calls for violence, that I don't know why you even need to see examples. Look for them everywhere, even on HN.
Look, this is a very diffuse topic. You're not going to get a clear example and we don't know what was happening behind the scenes at Twitter. But it's very telling that most tech companies are predominantly left-wing donors and have left-wing ideologies. Even if they act to be as impartial as they can, their bias will show because they have anti-republican discriminatory hiring practices.
So, to be clear, you’re saying that conservatism is synonymous with directly attacking “other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”? I couldn’t agree with such a broad claim about millions of people.
"Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates" was my example, and that doc absolutely targets it even though arguably misgendering and having blunt debates on the trans issue is not "directly attacking “other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.” according to your accusation.
Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules. Or that, in an argument about illegal immigration, a conservative forbidden from "asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities" will find it impossible to convey their belief that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit crime.
I don't personally agree with either position, but those rules clearly give conservatives an explicit disadvantage.
And the implicit advantage was more clear- I don't have a twitter account, but whenever I followed a link there, there were piles of recommended tweets about how white people are all racist, or complaining about toxic masculinity / mansplaining / manspreading, or how christians are evil and hate women, or how much boomers suck- all of this clearly in violation of the rules, none of it censored. Well, maybe some of it was censored, I wouldn't know. But they certainly left quite a lot untouched.
> Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is make direct targeted attacks against a specific person. You can say this is a dumb policy, you can rant about the concept in general, all you can’t do is say “@alice you’re really named Bob”.
Similarly, you can rant about immigrants and they wouldn’t do a thing as long as you could resist specifically targeting people.
Again, my point isn’t that Twitter was perfect or that they had solved every issue for balancing freedom of speech in an open forum but simply that rules against targeted attacks are not anti-conservative unless you have a very negative view of conservatism. It’s popular to try to score in-group points by whining about censorship but there’s a reason why nobody has been able to provide examples of actual conservative ideas being censored, because they know as soon as they do it’ll turn out to be something else which most people consider reasonable or, like the NYPost ban for hacked materials, a decision affecting one account which was reversed.
The rules are designed as such so that "well meaning" and well-thinking individuals such as yourself can provide an aura of protection over their actions, and "technically" be right. But in practice, the debate is definitely stifled in one direction.
Just look at the list of "notable Twitter bans", and you'll see a pattern. Among the clear "incitement of violence" and bot-accounts, there is a huge pattern of "we got banned and we don't know why, but we're vocal about X,Y,Z". One has to read between the lines. I'd be all for your argument and with you if we could have a clean-room look at the Twitter data to confirm, but we don't have that. Where is the twitter ban dataset that we can all have a look at?
Unfortunately, your beliefs align with that of the oppressor's side, so you don't see these and it'll be uncomfortable for you to go out on a limb. You think the system is "working as expected" and "they're only banning you if you target specific people".
It's weird to see people making spiteful comments about working for Musk.
I never see spiteful comments about people who work for British American Tobacco, BP or the Sacklers and these companies have, in my opinion, done far more damage to people, families and society in general.
If I can try to explain it - it is overcorrection from times when Tesla and SpaceX were cool with appealing mission places to work on. Bcs of that they could get away with smaller salaries too (although Tesla meteoric rise in value compensate it if you got options as I understand it).
There's free speech and there's amplification of speech. When Musk talks about "free speech" being denied what he's really complaining about is his views aren't being amplified. Obviously he can create a webpage somewhere and write whatever he wants on it (free speech), but that wouldn't be amplified so that's not what he wants. This is presumably also the reason he set fire to so much money buying Twitter.
That's not free speech, that's just might makes right principle which don't need a fancy name.
Free speech, at least on the Internet, means say what don't get the majority nod and enjoy getting harassed to literal suicide, death, mental health consequences, or all of above. Right makes might, not the normal way around.
IOW, free speech do come with consequences, and it's super-proportional on the Internet.
Clever! Give a thousand+ high earners a reason to buy a car. Install Superchargers in all the best parking spots to reserve them for Teslas. Most X employees are loyal to Musk, so that is probably $50M in additional revenue for TSLA, and he gets people to show up early if they want to charge at work. /s
I've never been a fan of Musk fwiw so I remember when the default attitude was to worship him. Why do so few people remember that? It was just as glaring as the hate now.
People seemed to have turned against him far before he started expressing controversial views. I think the original hate for him was a reaction to people who liked him as well as just generally an anti-capitalist sentiment.
Consider the lifestyle, world view and personality type of people who have a lot of time to get into culture war arguments on the internet and there you have your answer.
There is a thesis in your question. I'm not a terminated Twitter employee. I follow him on X and see exactly what he writes, the amount of disinformation he retweets, his manipulation tactics and what he does. That's enough for me to be "anti-Elon." It wasn't always like this—a few years ago, I was pro-Elon.
You could start by looking at stock price. TSLA is flat since 2020, and their only release in a long time is the Cybertruck which is frankly terrible. They've also lost a huge amount of marketshare. Oh, and Musk's outspoken political opinions are toxic to most EV buyers and have massively turned off a large part of the fanbase that originally propelled him to success.
Twitter is a complete dumpster fire (revenue down 80% since he acquired it, and is now making only around 10% of the money required to even service the debt from acquisition). Basically every company he's involved with is doing terribly, except for SpaceX, which fortunately has Gwynne Shotwell at the helm. But even SpaceX isn't doing so well with their latest rocket, Starship; the upper stage is simply way too big and heavy for most uses, and will require up to 15 (!!) additional refueling in-orbit refueling launches to fully refuel a single Starship for missions beyond LEO, like the upcoming lunar missions. This is a huge liability that casts doubt on the overall architecture. Contrast with the Saturn V, a smaller rocket that could nevertheless do an entire self-contained lunar mission with a single launch.
I was a huge Elon fan for many years, but everything he's been doing recently has been a swing and a miss.
They released a refreshed Model X and Model S in 2021, a refreshed Model 3 in 2023, and the Cybertruck in 2023/2024. FSD 12 was also released in 2024. Most of the world does not care about Elon Musk's political opinions, and the fact that some people do is a testament to how unhinged everyone is in 2024. The Cybertruck is terrible based on what? It's an incredible piece of technology, and everyone who owns one loves it.
Twitter is a dumpster fire—fine. I couldn't care less about Twitter, but at least it's not heavily moderated like its competitors. If you don't like Twitter, don't use it. SpaceX is very successful by every metric, even without Starship.
Nobody cares about minor model refreshes or yet another iteration of a driver assist technology. Tesla's only real release in many years is Cybertruck. They were supposed to have the Roadster out by now too, but that's years late.
But if Tesla is really doing so well as you claim, why has their net profit significantly decreased two quarters in a row now? Why is their stock back at levels from 4 years ago? Why has it underperformed the S&P by 17 percentage points sinc ethen? https://apnews.com/article/tesla-earnings-second-quarter-sal...
The semi is such a failure that I completely forgot about it. As far as I can tell, it's shipped around 150 units in total. It's basically a complete non-factor for a company with a valuation of $600B.
It's not an unrealistic observation given that Twitter generates over half of its income in the US and almost a third of its daily active users is American. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...). The app is quite small and geographically centralized, with about 200 million daily active users. If its popularity in the US drops off with the already strained advertiser situation twitter is probably going to be in some trouble.
pushing anyone that has differing views from the platform is leaving it as another right wing echo chamber.
It's already far from the bastion of information flow than it used to be, but still retains some visibility because of it's history and brand name. This value is dropping fast - I'm not the person that you are asking, but I strongly suspect by the time the next election rolls around, it's simply going to be irrelevant.
The list of most retweeted tweets is telling - one from 2024, other than that, they are all from years ago,
> it was too obvious when things were being forced into your algorithm feed
As someone who uses Twitter to only follow Japanese people in Japan speaking Japanese, nothing was ever forced into my feed under the old management, it was all related Japanese hobby stuff, I saw zero English and zero politics.
Now it's super obvious that every n-th algorithmic entry has to be some blue check content to push their paid engagement numbers, and it's always some US brain rot, the algorithmic feed is completely useless for discovery now.
> and it was too obvious when things were being forced into your algorithm feed
It is funny that you say that. I never received random tweets from the previous leadership while Twitter inserts Elon Musk tweets in my feed more times than the people I follow. Only right wing nuts will think Twitter is getting better.
I think if you don't see the (often overt) bias of an outlet's media that you consume, the likeliest reason is that 1) you're not aware of current social and political topics or 2) the content already aligns with your politics and/or worldview.
It sounds like Elon Musk and perceived right wing bias are what inflame you. Perhaps that's how others felt about that short period under the old management when they were also not neutrally politically aligned?
I made it very clear in my post: Twitter never forced the leadership content directly into people's feed. Musk uses Twitter as his personal social network and to advance his political agenda.
Now you by the other hand is OK with that, because you pretty much prefer every person on twitter to read and follow you political agenda. And that's why Twitter became a extreme right wing echo-chamber.
What are you talking about? All "progressives" except for some software engineers are still there. Example (it does not get more progressive than that):
Yet another petty tyrant rants. In this time of cult of personality how is that newsworthy or unexpected? But this is "fortune.com", a corporate rag, so perhaps it is interesting to them.
You don't understand? Seriously? The terrible policies that are broadcasted everywhere online, through both text and video, isn't enough to understand?
I'm probably not a favorite amog the moderators here. I don't mean to sound snarky, but if Twitters moves out of San Francisco, will the no-nudity ordinance in San Francisco get repealed? I had understood it was the influx of the tech companies that caused the fiasco thet resulted in it being passed in the first place.
Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.
Community notes predate Musk. They're a lot more common now, but they're needed more than ever too. Meanwhile spam is everywhere (except in the "probable spam" section) and all ads are scams.
It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a position on the value of any of the other changes to the product.)
It is interesting that they appear to have solved or at least dramatically reduced the porn spam. Still cant open a post though without seeing 10+ posts about something completely unrelated in the comments
No, they haven't. I have at least one porn bot start following me every day. In any thread, a porn post can just randomly appear. TBH, the rate at which it's getting worse is increasing.
I don't think porn spam reduced at all, but indeed “engagement spam” has skyrocketed which makes porn spam less visible on popular tweets (but it's still prevalent everywhere else). And there's also much more sex workers than ever before advertising their onlyfan…
I'm mostly reading political tweets, and for the last year or so I have never noticed that - the comments can be of very varying quality, as always on an unmoderated forum, but I don't remember too much offtopic. Maybe it depends on who do you follow and who the bots are targeting - except Musk, my follows are usually not celebrities, so maybe bots don't bother targeting them.
I don't recall ever seeing porn spam in my ~8 years of using the site pre-Musk. Probably a few incidents here and there, but nothing notable enough that I remember it happening.
If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for something.
I have to admit, I have a loose understanding of what's going on with twitter or even how to use it. But my personal Mandela effect is that it didn't work right if you weren't logged in for a lot longer than that.
You used to be able to look at people's profiles, tweets and entire threads without being signed in. If you go to my profile today signed out you see tweets from before 2022. If you click on a tweet signed out, you only see that single tweet without context. Some of those changes are only a few months back.
There was briefly a log-in nag popup that would appear on scroll.
That disappeared and Musk got lots of praise for it, probably entirely unwarrented but it was basically the only thing that improved post-Musk. Then it came back with a vengeance.
What? No it wasn't! You used to be able to view entire Twitter threads without being logged in. It was also possible to go to someone's account page and see their posts in reverse chronological order. The latter went away shortly after Musk took over. The former took a little longer, but is now gone as well. In many cases you can't even view a single tweet without the site trying to get you to log in.
I remember it being the case before too. It wasn't unconditional like it is now. For example, I distinctly remember being able to scroll through someone's profile in a normal browser window without being logged in, but in an incognito window, I was immediately told to log in or create an account.
They may have had other heuristics too that led to inconsistent behavior between users. So it should not be so surprising if some people report that that happened even though it didn't happen to others.
Community notes sometimes provide useful context I'll grant you that... but often they are just a popularity contest to see which side can upvote which community note.
* No ability to browse the site without logging in
* Hundreds of spam account followers
* Sponsored content inserted in replies masquerading as real content
* Random bugs with video content constantly
* Twitter blue boosting replies to the top, making conversations effectively pay to win.
* Bot account spam comprising ~50% of the replies to any popular tweet
Despite the above, Twitter is still the best place on the internet to get the latest news and a feel for the zeitgeist. This to me is a testament of the incredible product created by Jack.
Every day I get 5-10 new followers bot followers. I haven't gotten a real follower in months, I don't use the account that much.
Other than that, the fyp shows me a lot of right wing content (and particularly
Elon Musk posts) that I ignore, but they do show them.
Regularly as I'm scrolling down the page, it'll randomly refresh or insert/disappear posts that I'm viewing. Yeah, the site is functional, but it is not better than its ever been. Not by a mile.
I see much more right wing content boosted by the algorithm now, and the paid checkmarks ensures every tweet's replies have low quality and bot replies filtered to the top.
The bot problem is also infinitely worse now, I rarely post anything so I have about two dozen legitimate followers, mostly people I know, and then I have a few hundred obvious bot account followers.
I think it's because Twitter doesn't bury and ban moderate and conservative opinions now. It feels like there's more balance today. I'd say in my experience I've seen more of the far left voices I follow move away from the platform (although many moved back) and they're not as powerful not that the Twitter team isn't backing them exclusivly.
What are you talking about? Open any twitter link and there is a pretty good chance it just doesn't work lol. And even if it does work hopefully it isn't a thread because you won't see any of the parent comments or replies.
I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.