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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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There have been a lot of lay offs in the tech space. I’m sure Elon can hire some people. But the truth is Twitter had too much staff for the value it was getting. You need to cut costs make it through a few months and the ad boycott will end.

Unfortunately the ad boycott is likely both ideological and personal (in that a lot of people Elon got rid of were buddies to the ad buyers) and thus is unlikely to end. GroupM's shakedown letter (see bulleted list) demonstrates that.

Meh, it's easy for advertising consortia to dunk on him now, in an economic downturn, when his product relies on brand advertising (i.e. ads that can't measure conversions) and brand advertising is the highest beta of all of the marketing categories. The truth is that their threats are downstream of their extrinsic need to pull back on that category of spending. It's mostly just a demand failure masquerading as a boycott.

Remember all those companies boycotting Facebook? Me neither. Take a look at their latest revenue and you can see it didn't matter.

If Twitter advertising is effective, then there will be plenty of demand from people who like money. The boycott will only matter if it turns out that Twitter advertising didn't work and companies were throwing money at it anyway. Which I accept is possible.

Assuming ads actually generate revenue (who knows) companies ultimate log will pay for ads where there is a large user base.

Not if they have a more important reason than revenue not to.

And the staff it had were entrenched within a culture of censorship and narrative control. The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something, and then move the whole HQ out of the compromised bay area. I bet that would be a lot cheaper of a building to run than the current one as well. Then you could also make sure the (hopefully minimal) moderation team was staffed by normal people as well, instead of the types that tend to gravitate to SF.

The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something

Even better move would be do it all before you acquire Twitter, to have ready new management and new staff from day one.

Instead, it looks that Elon learned from Bush's success in Iraq.

1/Take over

2/Fire all management and personnel

3/???

4/Profit!

Elon's actions will lead directly to profits in a way that is easy to understand.

Twitter was bleeding money, losing $1.1 billion in 2020 alone.

They had a $13M meals program that was feeding less than 10% of the staff because no one showed up to HQ. It was costing hundreds of dollars per meal, with more people preparing food than eating it. It's laughably stupid.

My sense is Twitter was hyper-bloated, with ~10x more employees than they needed, so 90% layoffs seem about right. It's a microblogging website that grew to have a bunch of completely superfluous positions with people who literally contributed nothing.

Right-sizing the staff, cutting needless expenses, adding a revenue stream with a re-imagined Twitter Blue, reducing trolls/bots—these are all common sense. The advertisers will come back, as the only metric that matters is user engagement, and it's at an all time high & will continue to grow through 2024 with what will be the most "entertaining" election in U.S. history.

Elon will turn Twitter into the profitable Center of the Internet, and a certain tribe will be pretending the sky is falling the whole time.

#RIPTwitter & #Twitterisdown was trending during the highest engagement period in Twitter's existence. It's the fakest news that's ever been.

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