site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2560 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 24, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So when Musk took over Twitter (using the old name since it was the name back then) he famously fired about 3/4 of Twitter employees. Pretty much everybody who knew anything about anything predicted Twitter will fail catastrophically very soon after. Of course, now we know it didn't happen. My question is - does anybody have any evidence of Twitter service becoming worse at all in any way since then? I don't mean worse like "people can now post things I don't like" but objectively worse like site is not loading, or search not working or any of the stuff like that.

It's better than ever and people who say otherwise are showing sure signs of um.. EDS, or is it MDS?

Let's remind ourselves that there is no amount of real world success that can dissuade the true believers. There are still people in 2024 who think that Venezuela is either 1) thriving or 2) only failing because of US sanctions.

The Communists have still not admitted defeat, and think that the communism would work just great if it were only tried, man. On a similar note, the anti-Muskites still think that everything Musk has achieved is just luck and, furthermore, that they personally could have done better. It's all the worst sort of cope.

Twitter never needed those grifters and it's better without them. Almost all companies which employ laptop workers are in a similar state.

Some hot takes you've got there.

"True believers" are, by definition, awfully hard to convince. But why should "anti-Muskites" act anything like Communists? People hate him because he flatters their outgroup, not because of some abstract reasoning. He personally did something that annoyed them, so they started showing symptoms of Elon Derangement. This is pretty normal.

There are a lot of weird errors and inexplicable decisions on Twitter, but I can't tell if it's gotten worse. The timeline spazzes out constantly, showing the same stuff over and over. The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.

Granted, the only part of that different from 2020 was actually getting unbanned, but still.

The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.

OK so that at least disproves the theory moderation doesn't exist anymore ;) I remember pre-Musk I once created a secondary twitter account for some silly project of mine, made a hello world tweet and it was promptly permanently suspended. I didn't even bother to research why, I just dropped the twitter part of the project and forgot about it.

Not in such basics as 'not loading', but qualitatively the twitter experience is now way worse, to the point I don't really use it anymore it's so bad. The prioritisation of blue check replies has made replies on any post that becomes popular totally worthless, since it's mostly bots/meaningless garbage. For You is totally worthless as it just serves up the worst kind of lowest common denominator internet slop, and while one can (and I usually did) just use the other tab for accounts you follow, twitter alongside mostly giving me my own follows' posts used to regularly suggest interesting and worthwhile smaller posts and accounts. Now the garbage rises to the top, the cream to the bottom. Checking back now having been away for a few weeks I've been followed by 50+ scam bots.

So while it still functions what made the app useful and good has basically been totally ruined. I think monetisation was a dreadful idea since it gives strong incentives to post slop in order to rise to the top, and the same goes for allowing people to pay to boost their nonsense. No doubt the slop existed before Elon, but I at least never really had it pushed to me by twitter before, it became relentless so no I don't bother. Elon's own account is really the embodiment of the kind of place twitter has become. It would probably be good again if they summarily IP banned anyone who had ever bought a blue check.

I have no idea whether any of this has anything to do with the staff that were sacked, but I think it's a cautionary tale against tech bro 'disruptors' and the 'move fast and break things' philosophy. For all people rightly say 'twitter isn't real life', it used to be a pretty important gathering place for influential and interesting people in the UK politics, policy and journalism sphere. Now it tends to be like scrolling a big subreddit in 2014.

My experience is of course the opposite.

I see way more discussion about "real" topics like engineering. Twitter used to be mostly pop culture and culture war nonsense. Not it seems a lot more like real human beings having actual, real discussions (well...not really discussions. I still think that twitter/X are the wrong format for conversation).

The prioritisation of blue check replies has made replies on any post that becomes popular totally worthless, since it's mostly bots/meaningless garbage.

Haven't noticed that but I must be reading different parts of it, and I usually don't read the replies beyond the first dozen or so. Even that is mostly frivolous...

Checking back now having been away for a few weeks I've been followed by 50+ scam bots.

I feel a major FMO case here, I've had my twitter acct for years and still have 2 followers (that's how it should be, it's a strictly r/o account).

Elon's own account is really the embodiment of the kind of place twitter has become

I must miss the point here - what's wrong with Elon's account? I mean except the fact that miltibillionaire and owner of several huge enterprises spends so much time on stupid tweets, but it's his time not mine, why would I tell him how to spend it? Otherwise, I think his content is exactly what this format is for, or at least what I have always thought it's for. I know some people put longreads and effortposts into twitter, which is imho insane - just get a substack, dude! - but I never thought it should or ever would be the norm.

I think it's a cautionary tale against tech bro 'disruptors' and the 'move fast and break things' philosophy.

Not sure what it's supposed to caution us against though. Did you really imagine twitter would be some kind of philosopher's kingdom if not Musk? To me, it always have been a mess since the inception and that's the whole point. If "influential people", whoever they are, can't find a better place to gather and talk about serious stuff than twitter I think it's not Musk's problem. They are just doing it wrong (ah, if that were the only thing they are doing wrong...) - and also imagining that you would do politics, policy or journalism with pre-Musk moderation in place makes me deeply sad. Though as "deeply sad" is my default setting now thinking about anything related to UK politics, it's not much change, admittedly.

It looks like the specific departments where >75% of the employees were fired (primarily ad sales and content moderation, on my understanding) did fall over - ad revenue crashed, and content moderation is (quite deliberately on the part of Musk) no longer happening, except when Musk wants to ban one of his political opponents on a whim. There were also some moderately serious legal problems that looked like they stemmed from too many HR/finance/etc. staff being fired too fast. (If you fire the HR lady first, you replace her before you fire anyone else).

I think the fraction of the core technical staff fired was closer to 25%. And, per Jack Welch et. al, any organisation which hasn't been purged recently (which Twitter so hadn't been) can usefully fire the lowest-performing 20% of the staff - so the cull of the technical teams was no big deal.

It looks like the specific departments where >75% of the employees were fired (primarily ad sales and content moderation, on my understanding) did fall over - ad revenue crashed, and content moderation is (quite deliberately on the part of Musk) no longer happening, except when Musk wants to ban one of his political opponents on a whim.

The ad boycott doesn't seem like the service becoming worse, since the variety and types of ads that a user sees tends to have minimal impact on the user's experience. But even if it were, the ad boycott seems largely coincidental to the firing of ad sales employees, since, AFAIK, the ad boycott happened primarily for ideological reasons rather than due to the lack of resources or competence of the ad sales department on Twitter. The content moderation result seems like almost a strict improvement in service, though opinions obviously vary.

Did Musk really fire 75% of the ad sales department? That seems dumb for an ad business, even for him.

Unless he knew in advance there would be an advertiser boycott and wanted to save money in the long run.

He was planning to shift away from ad revenue and towards a subscription scheme before he closed the purchase.

Pretty much everybody who knew anything about anything predicted Twitter will fail catastrophically very soon after

Did they ?

Twitter was well known for the being the most do-nothing company in big tech for some time before 2022. My friend (deliberately) joined there in 2021, and did zero work. I mean it. He wanted to start a startup, so he he built his own product full time and free-loaded as a Twitter employee. Yes, he likely would've been laid off even without Elon's interference, but any other org would've kicked him out within the first 2 months.

Twitter at it's first user peak (around 2015) had 3500 employees. In 2022, It had 7500 without any additional user acquisition. In 2024, it has 2800. Twitter was a bloated company in dire need of layoffs. Twitter was totally fine in 2015, and it's only down 20% employees from that period. Twitter's work life balance is well known to have gone to shit. If every employee is working 20% more time, the effective hours worked haven't changed much.

A lot of twitter projects were 'growth projects'. They were trying to expand to other markets, build new products and worked on optimization. All of these people got fired. Some deserved it, but many were already net-positives for the company from a revenue standpoint. Eg: 2% code improvement = $2 million saved for $400k spent on an engineer. That sort of thing.

Elon has separated the AI org out of twitter. XAI already has 100 employees, and will quickly scale up to a few hundred. It may not be counted as part of twitter, but pre-elon twitter was trying to do exactly this under their cortex [1] org.

Twitter at its first user peak (around 2015) had 3500 employees. In 2022, It had 7500 without any additional user acquisition. In 2024, it has 2800.

In 2010, Google had just over 20,000 employees. Its major products were Search and AdSense, with YouTube, Chrome, GMail/Docs and Android following distantly behind.

Today, Google has almost 200,000 employees. Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008, and they’re still distantly followed by YouTube, Chrome, GSuite and Android, with a modest cloud business added to the list.

Unlike Twitter, Google makes a lot of money. But it is still extraordinarily inefficient, and its headcount is likely at least 4x where it could be under competent administration. Every big tech business experiences extreme bloat because of a combination of the iron law of bureaucracy and more general fiefdom internal politics.

Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008

I could swear Search is outright worse than it was in 2008...

For users, maybe, but bringing money to owners - probably not

It’s funny to call a $20B business “modest,” but I suppose that’s true for Google’s scale.

According to this report, their services division spent $87B to make $144B. The Cloud and “Other Bets” segments are basically rounding errors in comparison.

Did they ?

I certainly read it stated very confidently dozens of times.

Twitter was well known for the being the most do-nothing company in big tech for some time before 2022.

I worked with some people ex-Twitter, and they were pretty competent programmers. No idea what (if anything) they did in Twitter though.

Some deserved it, but many were already net-positives for the company from a revenue standpoint.

Products like what? Twitter revenue seems to be exclusively ads, isn't it?

Oh yeah, the hiring bar for twitter was still the same as other FANG companies. So, the employees (at least non-DEI programmers) were definitely competent. But it had insane redtape. My friend complained about the amount of redtape at twitter after leaving a team working on highly-sensitive data at Microsoft. So that's saying something.

Products like what?

They never saw the light of day. Most products created at big-tech die before they get too far. Google is infamous for this. But, it's an issue at other FAANGs too.

I definitely get more bot friend requests post elon. There was a while that i was getting lots of fake messages right at first, that's about it

TIL there's something called "friend request" on twitter. I had an account there for many years (exclusively for reading/bookmarking) never even had one.

It's no longer possible to read much of anything without logging in, which I suspect is a load shedding measure.

xcancel.com

You can still read the individual tweets, not the threads though, right?

Yes, though you also can't see a person's latest tweets from their profile page. So mostly you have to be linked to a tweet to see it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats