[PreludeSH]

Originally Posted by Electromotive

Attachment 2373533

Amen!

How many managers does it take to change a light bulb?

1) A roomful - they have to hold a meeting to discuss all the ramifications of the change.

2) None, they like to keep employees in the dark.

3) "This topic was resumed from last week's discussion, but is incomplete pending resolution of some action items. It will be continued next week. Meanwhile ..."

4) "We've formed a task-force to study the problem of why light bulbs burn out, and to figure out what, exactly, we as supervisors can do to make the bulbs work smarter, not harder."

Could be an exaggeration from Musk. A product company does need a lot of manpower. An employee base of 7500 is not that high for a company with that much of revenue.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by PreludeSH

Could be an exaggeration from Musk. A product company does need a lot of manpower. An employee base of 7500 is not that high for a company with that much of revenue.

He could be referring to BS jobs as managerial jobs.

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/1730874...reet-karl-marx

[dragonfire]

Originally Posted by Electromotive

How many managers does it take to change a light bulb?

Lately the project I am part of went into red and the management responded by adding more managers to the project. These managers go around holding daily status meetings - as if taking status gets the job done. What results is we getting stuck in meetings and us having less time to get the job done.

[mayukh42]

Originally Posted by Hayek

Parag, the CFO and the GC have together delivered a fantastic deal for Twitter shareholders

While they need to be applauded for doing their job well, they also did not have any other option. As leaders of a publicly traded company, they could not stall the buyout which would be against the interests of shareholders, which they themselves are too.

So they did what they were supposed to do, aligned with their personal interests as well.

OT: Money talks, not idealism. If the leaders at Twitter including Jack were so keen on preserving the leftist echo-chamber, they could have gone private themselves, like Dell. It is not possible in the long term to have a publicly traded company be the playground of a specific subset.

[Electromotive]

Originally Posted by PreludeSH

Could be an exaggeration from Musk. A product company does need a lot of manpower. An employee base of 7500 is not that high for a company with that much of revenue.

In my experience, middle-managers seem to exist only to preserve their jobs. Flat org. structures generally lead to higher productivity and greater personal accountability.

[PreludeSH]

I agree there are jobs that are not needed. But sometimes (yes only sometimes) what they do will have to be done by people who are productive

Although its not always needed, trying to automate or put processes in place to get rid of them takes its own time. When companies are doing good, they dont mind these people.

[volkman10]

Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts.

Twitter had over 7,000 employees at the end of 2021, according to a regulatory filing and a quarter of the headcount amounts to nearly 2,000 employees.

Link

[volkman10]

Elon Musk, who runs four other companies, will now be Twitter CEO.

Twitter on Monday declined comment on how long Musk might remain CEO or appoint someone else.

In another filing, Musk revealed that he became the sole director of Twitter as a result of the takeover.

Link

[Turbohead]

So will Musk prove to be the saviour he is? I mean will political brainwashing come to an end by bots spewing hate?

[SnS_12]

Originally Posted by volkman10

Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts.

Kicking off extra/unwanted employees will help bring down expenses but they have to be careful and not loose out the people who actually bring in revenues and have the business contacts in place as advertising accounts for more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue.

Also, they really have to look at increasing the revenues from now on in order to service the massive debt raised to buy twitter.

As part of the deal, Twitter will add about $13 billion of debt. Analysts estimate, based on terms previously laid out in documents related to the transaction, that Twitter would be on the hook for annual interest payments of more than $1 billion, compared with some $51 million in 2021. Twitter has posted average annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $700 million over the past five years.

https://domeasmsp.cdome.net/user/104...ser_quarantine

[Electromotive]

Elon Musk fires Twitter board, making himself sole director

[nareshov]

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/...ech-moderation



There are several hyperlinks in the above article.

Welcome to hell, Elon
You break it, you buy it.

By NILAY PATEL / @reckless
Oct 28, 2022 at 3:02 PM GMT+2267 Comments / 267 New
Share this story



You ****ed up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total *******s. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.

Also, everyone crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the ****ing government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment. They’re out here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle!

State governments are even less subtle: both Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that overtly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws is not an engineering problem (not least because compliance might be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government to shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court, which is the polar opposite of a predictable system: it is a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that can radically reshape American life however it wants.

You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to engage in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do any of this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader you first harassed and then fired? This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them.

Related

Elon Musk bought Twitter. Here’s how it happened.
And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that shit. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the fact that the Iranian government will ****ing murder people over their social media posts? (Are you ready for how Twitter is being used by Iranians protesting that government right now?) Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.

[amitoj]

Elon Musk posts, deletes tweet with baseless rumor about Paul Pelosi attack

Haha! Was he testing Twitter's algorithm to detect fake news? Realization must have hit hard.

[SnS_12]

Originally Posted by nareshov

And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws?

More than following their laws these government's would be wondering how will they push forward their views and agenda under the new leadership of Elon. Won't be surprising if its found out that major part of Twitter's revenue came in from political parties/government's both in US and outside and Elon's take over is now making these organizations think about continuing their association with twitter going forward.

The German government will consider whether it still wants to have a presence on Twitter following the takeover by the world's richest man Elon Musk.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/g...er-2022-10-28/

[sgmuser]

I have great respect for Elon Musk when it comes to his achievements in the Product development. But Twitter and properly monetizing it is a different game altogether. Somehow I feel he will either screw it up big or might succeed (he might have an ace up his sleeve which we do not know). There is nothing in between. Twitter is a powerful tool and the only one where FB/Meta does not have their dirty hand in. I only have a Twitter account (hardly post, but used to follow some) and do not have either IG or FB. I have Whatsapp even before FB took over it, so, I have to live with it. I had great respect for Jack as well as he did not go behind money but rather he stuck to his ideologies. After sometime, you will see 10 ads before you see a post and 5 video ads after. 44 billion is not a small amount and the shareholders will push Elon to do this. Charging will not make much money but the ads will do.