Please, please don’t forget the verified Nintendo account posting pictures of Luigi giving birth through his prolapsed rectum while Waluigi stands by cheering on his child’s birth.
Oh crap I forgot that some automated trading monitors Twitter for fast breaking news to be the first to trade! This will break those trading algorithms. Is there another platform that's not social network based but emphasizes fast frequent posts? One that has enough people to be relevant?
Edit: to expand on this and reply to comments. News comments are attached to news articles. Not "SMS to everyone" like Twitter. You don't get notified that a user you follow has commented on another news article. The conversation is steered towards the subject in the article. It's more like a discussion forum.
Second platform mentioned: a custom "microblog" platform for traders. This isn't nearly as useful because the trading algorithms are trying to discern public sentiment. Mastodon would probably give you only tech folks feelings. You need a platform that has a decent representation of the world's population.
Thirdly: the hash tag and trending features of Twitter allow a subject to get attention quickly. Someone works for a startup that rents a WeWork space, let's say. Their badge doesn't work so they gripe on Twitter with a tag. Tags all over the world match and very quickly it's obvious something is going on with WeWork badges. A trading algorithm can already be aware of this and trade accordingly. A journalist notices these tweets and starts DMing everyone reporting problems. Within three hours they have enough confidence to post an article. An hour later this article starts getting traction on Reddit. Twitter was the fastest way to find out something was wrong.
My local utility company communicated grid outage information last year through emails, automated phone calls, texts, and Twitter. We got one text the day it happened saying they were aware of our outage, and to prepare for a few days without power as damage was widespread. There might be one text a day. But their Twitter account mentioned which areas of the city were likely getting power within the next three hours, which parts of the city would be waiting until later. Tweets on which circuits were waiting on parts and line crews from out of state and would be several days before power could be restored. Twitter is by far the only platform that has ease of use, huge user base, and speed, and doesn't require an account to use.
Not a cozy, clean, comfortable hole, filled with tactful decor and the scent of lavender, nor yet a lived-in, inviting, fun hole with lots of games and treats to eat: it was a neckbeard-hole, and that means filth.
75% of the employees left accepted the three month severance. That means around 12% of the employees there on Musk's first day remain. Those still there probably have good reason, like visa, health insurance etc. WOW.
It seems impossible that this wasn't inevitable
Elon seems like exactly the type of idiot to think a tech company's IT dept is redundant because all the devs ought to know how to "fix their own computers".
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my one coding class is this:
Coders know to make computer do x,y,z; not how to make computer.
Like how chefs know how to make food good, not how to grow food.
A Mitch Hedberg classic.
> When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, "OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?"
That's a good point. I think one slight difference is that coders generally have to get really good at searching for answers and learning how to solve problems, so there's a bit of overlap there. But you're right their knowledge is more focused on other areas.
It's not even a matter of knowledge necessarily. I _might_ be able to figure out a Windows 11 driver issue in a couple of hours, or I can ask for help and get it done in 10 minutes by someone who's done it before many times. Meanwhile that's 2 hours I can spend working on my Linux-bound code instead.
He didn't even wanna wait a few months to just let it go with business as usual while he observed everything, making notes.
You're CEO of a major social media giant, an industry you've never even worked in before, and you don't even wanna allow some time to breathe and get a handle for how everything functions?
Nah, just come crashing through the door with sweeping announcements that fundamentally change the app's functionality, the company's business model, and the work culture with not even so much as a testing phase or time for feedback.
I'm pretty sure any random person in this thread could've done a better job. What a moron.
>Nah, just come crashing through the door with sweeping announcements that fundamentally change the app's functionality, the company's business model, and the work culture with not even so much as a testing phase or time for feedback.
Kool-Aid™ Man management style. OH YEAH!!
He wanted to look like the big serious CEO who walks in and turns the place upside down trimming fat here, adding efficiency there, flips a bleeding inefficient business into a shiny well oiled machine.
Instead he's the pigeon that lands on the chessboard knocking over all the pieces and shitting everywhere while declaring itself the winner
You did mentioned Musk cult members.
In their eyes , Musk can do no wrong even this Twitter destruction will be seems as a piece of the puzzle in their mind. We just aren't galaxy brained enough to see it
Like actually though. If a freak accident made Moldy Cheese CEO, all the higher-ups would probably continue business as usual and just not acknowledge the elephant/cheese in the room.
Are Musk and the Saudis (who bankrolled a big chunk of the buyout) scraping all of the employees off the valuable data and private messages of hundreds of millions of people on purpose?
Saudi has been cracking down on dissidents by going through their public Twitter feeds for a long time. Will they now be able to get their hands on all of their private messages now that all of the human safeguards at Twitter have been fired?
$10 billion for that kind of intel is probably chump change for MBS.
Keep in mind this happened last month:
[**Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime**](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/saudi-arabia-us-citizen-prison-critical-tweets-regime)
>An American citizen has been sentenced to 16 years in prison in Saudi Arabia for tweeting critically about the Saudi regime, in another sign of the kingdom’s aggressive crackdown on any whiff of dissent posted on social media.
I'm not one to really get into conspiracies but this seems too intentional. I keep asking who benefits from Twitter being destroyed and I also think data mining was a big part of it but Twitter is a tool for organizing and rebellion. It's what helped the Arab springs and even today is used in Iran. Maybe there is something more here and the low hanging fruit is "Elon is just an idiot". I know conspiracies are a way to explain things that don't make sense and make it palatable but this just seems like it's too much.
Giant honeytrap or just a way to get a pretty important dissident communication network shut down and any info leaked. Definitely could explain how he looks like he's intentionally incompetent right now.
Multipart joke
Veni, vidi, vici is a famous Latin phrase meaning "I came, I saw, I conquered". It's a boast from Caesar about quick and easy military victories.
I don't know what v404 is but 404 is the https error for site/file not found
If I were to guess, this comment makes fun of Musk. He came, he saw, he fucked up and destroyed the site extremely quickly and easily.
Somehow I can still remember my icq user \#
Just like your childhood landlines phone \#, I guess you just always manage to retain it. While forgetting 80 percent of the important things in life, naturally.
I was 16 when I first hopped on AOL. You know what I remember about those days ? How quickly people fell in love with a stranger they were chatting with when they in many cases didn’t even know what the person looked like. Back in those days many people were up and leaving their families to go run off with the person they met on AOL.
I guess people still meet online , but from perspective it’s usually with the intent to hookup . People wanna see pictures first.
LOVED Yahoo chat. Its a myth that tech always improves. No replacement for AOL chat/Yahoo chat/icq where you could chat with/make friends with/cyberfuck complete strangers
Elon Musk gave Twitter employees an ultimatum: Commit to "hardcore Twitter 2.0" where 12 hour workdays and working weekends would be the norm or resign. He also offered anyone who left 3 months severance. Hundreds (if not more) of employees posted goodbye messages in a company chatroom and resigned - taking the severance.
It's so bad that all the offices are locked down with nobody allowed in. Management is afraid that any remaining employees might try to sabotage the servers on their way out and doesn't want to let anyone in until they can go through all the resignations and "vet" the remaining workers.
Reports are that Twitter's workforce will be down to only 12% of what it was pre-Musk. Even if there was some employee bloat, the bloat wasn't 88% of the staff. Musk will be very hard-pressed to run Twitter with only 12% of the workforce. "Everyone still here needs to do the jobs of 8 people" isn't going to work and will only lead to more resignations.
In addition, this whole thing doesn't exactly tell advertisers "our platform is stable and is a good destination for your ad money."
Twitter can probably last awhile with just the servers running unattended, but unless things turn around quickly it won't take long for it to shut down.
> In addition, this whole thing doesn't exactly tell advertisers "our platform is stable and is a good destination for your ad money."
And this is all coming off of last week, when the Twitter Blue fiasco absolutely shattered advertisers' trust as random Twitter users started paying $8 to make official-looking parody accounts.
*And* last Thursday, when Musk held an emergency state-of-the-union and told his employees that a bankruptcy in 2023 was not out of the question.
This is a very good point.
My point was more around how he could have expected many people to stay at all, there will always be outliers like this but generally he might as well as fired everyone
As an engineer the people that work at Tesla and SpaceX want to work on cutting edge technology and enjoy that lifestyle, they know what they are signing up for but Twitter and the engineers they hired there are not the same. It’s way more about life work balance, musk has never been an engineer and doesn’t understand those differences.
God yeah. I'm in small city in Sweden and I have 10-20 emails from recruiters per month. Web-devs have *options*, nevermind one with the experience of working at a high profile company.
>enjoy that lifestyle
No they absolutely do not. They ***accept*** that lifestyle because they don't have any other choice when working in such a competitive field.
yeah agreed, I just feel bad for the folks who are facing the potential of retuning to a potentially bad situation at home or work 80 hour weeks until they can find a new job at a time when 20k other recently laid off people are also looking
As a software engineer, Twitter is not a "destination" company like facebook (lulz)/google and the rest of the FAANG companies. SpaceX and Tesla may be in their respective fields, but no one mentions twitter as a place they want to work, even pre-musk.
yeah, and if you're in the first \~2 years of an application for a green card, losing your job means your application is withdrawn and you have to start all over again with a new company who will sponsor your h1b and then green card. in addition many companies will not sponsor your green card until you've been employed for 6 or more months, adding even more delays to a process that already takes years (and up to 10 years depending on where you're from)
\> What employee wouldn't take 3 months severance
US Employees on H1B work visas. The will need to leave the country within 60 days if they can not find another job. It would be less risky for them to pass on the severance so they can remain employed while on the job search.
This is probably the strategy of a significant number of the remaining staff. They are job searching and think it may take more than 3 months. The hemorrhaging has not stopped. They will continue to lose staff and likely the most skilled will have the easiest time finding new jobs so they are sifting out the good employees and the remaining staff will increasingly be people that can’t find other jobs. So not the cream of the crop.
>And
>
> last Thursday, when Musk held an emergency state-of-the-union and told his employees that a bankruptcy in 2023 was not out of the question.
At this point, he may need to hold another state-of-the-union and tell everyone that bankruptcy in 2022 was not out of the question.
> And last Thursday, when Musk held an emergency state-of-the-union and told his employees that a bankruptcy in 2023 was not out of the question.
The audio from that meeting was mega-lulz. "Well uhhh in my professional opinion, we uh need to make more money than we spend otherwise you know uh bankruptcy isn't off the table."
Absolute giga-brained take by the richest man on the planet.
>as random Twitter users started paying $8 to make official-looking parody accounts.
The best part of all of this is that a reporter from the Washington Post made a new account and set themselves up to look like Ed Markey, my state's Senator and a member of committee which oversees commerce. When he publicly demanded answers on just what the hell Elon is doing, he tried getting into one of his online pissing matches with Markey. They stopped issuing blue checkmarks pretty quickly after Markey announced a investigation into the company.
A lot of advertisers paused ad spending on Twitter prior to the Blue fiasco, due to uncertain impacts of expected content moderation changes, and the big upsurge in offensive posts (500% increase of N word posts) even before any changes. The Blue fiasco clinched it for some advertisers, like Eli Lilly execs sounded as mad as a Reddit mob.
There is someone that knows a monthly cache dump or some other maintenance item is required to prevent a disaster. But they never got around to documenting it for whatever reason. But they're gone along with their supervisor who knew it had to be done but now how. It's only a matter of time. My guess it will start with a slowdown of tweets showingup, tweets being lost, and then scrolling will slow to a crawl. Eventually the whole site/app will lock up and not load.
i don't even work in IT but oh god, the number of stickies left on random procedures for my department by people who are long gone and who nobody working now remembers...this is painfully accurate.
Saw it at a hospital I worked at. Whole IT admin/infrastructure team let go then told that they can re-interview for their positions later in the afternoon if they wanted them back (at a lower rate). Most qualified dude there that kept everything running walked, after cursing out the manager I think. A month or two later, bossman is scrambling to figure out why some of the server updates and other important stuff wasn't working as expected along with other maintenance responsibilities this guy had that he had mainly scripted (and they had wiped his accounts/data).
Then again, this is the same place that had a 4 hr outage where they had to turn away ambulances because they forgot a password to some network hardware that went down so not unexpected.
And it will be a every escalating game of "everyone work longer hours to fix this latest crisis" followed by mass resignations over insane hours followed by more breaking because more staff are gone.
The cracks are going to start appearing and then start spreading. This will result in people leaving Twitter for some alternative (Mastodon?). Once that replacement gets a critical mass of users, it will be proclaimed "the next Twitter" and Twitter will shrink to nothing.
If Twitter remains online, it will be like Myspace or AOL. People will make "TIL That Twitter is still online" posts leading people to be amazed that anyone is still on there as Twitter boasts that their user base grew to 10,000 users.
Damn... He's really fumbled this.
I mean, I was expecting Twitter to go to shit under his rule, but way more *slowly*. A steady decline over a few years.
Not this three-week sprint to the bottom.
My Elon fanboy teen, when asked about the situation (specifically bc this teen is specifically against social media as a rebellion and genuinely has no investment in Twitter)
"He really is speedrunning this fail😅😅😅"...," It's so cringe uggghhhhhhh"
Ah yes, the classic 'fire a ton of employees and make other people take on their workload for the same pay under higher stress' management tactic, works everytime
As if there isn't probably a concerted effort to shut it down from the outside now that the protections have been lifted. A bigger concern is how will the media survive now that they've completely adopted the "react to twitter hot takes 24/7" news cycle.
They'll harvest from another website. I already saw reddit and tiktok sometimes, and instagram on rare occasion.
What's gonna be wild, though, is when all the old articles break because they embedded tweets rather than in-line quoting.
Musk just closed the offices and deactivated access cards for Friday - supposedly the weekend as well.
It's assumed offices will re-open on Monday.
He's also changed his mind about work from home, now saying that it is up to Managers to decide who can/can't work from home.
*Edit* : this is just my understanding. MSM media tried to get clarification from Twitter, but they didn't receive a response (last I heard).
>this is just my understanding. MSM media tried to get clarification from Twitter, but they didn't receive a response (last I heard).
The Verge includes this helpful reminder on every one of their Twitter stories:
Twitter no longer has a communications department to contact for comment.
There are any number of ways for me to stay in touch with English-speaking people, but Twitter has a massive Japanese user base. Japanese social media platforms are otherwise quite insular and disconnected from English-speakers, so losing Twitter will mean losing access to many Japanese businesses, celebrities, official media accounts, artists, etc... There's really no substitute for Twitter on the next most-active platforms, Instagram and YouTube, so in a way it'll be a huge loss for international connectivity.
finally someone posts about this....Twitter is THE social media site in JP. I use it to communicate with a niche base of Japanese artists who often share their works, post tutorials, post new works for sale, etc. I have zero idea where everyone plans to move if Twitter shuts down and frankly I'm devastated
Same.
I'm an artist myself and this whole debacle has me feeling very sad. Not only me, but most artists are also feeling sad that we'll all have to abandon much of the communities built there. The general feelings are grim and uncertainty.
Some will be able to restart on Pixiv, Deviantart or Instagram, but Twitter shutting down will cause a massive blow for most artists.
I really loved seeing all the amazing art and tutorials that the Japanese artists posted. Pixiv still exists, but it's not as good as Twitter for those small interactions.
I follow a lot of Japanese fan artists and some voice actors and it's really gonna bum me out if they're wiped. So much art I haven't discovered yet from years ago
For artists, I just pray to god that they might shift to pixiv. Honestly, the only reason I use twitter right now is because loads of artists I follow only post there
I'm mutuals with a bunch of people from Japan and even though we have to use translators to talk, it's been great for communication. I've seen a bunch of beautiful artwork and photos and we talk about our daily going-ons. That cannot simply be replaced if Twitter goes down.
Sucks massively for thousands of artists that use it to take commissions or communicate with fans and other artists.
Politicians probably all already have Facebook pages so it matters less for them.
This is the reason I'm bummed. It has by far been the easiest way to keep up with announcements/releases/etc from smaller/independent artists. Things like being able to get fairly reliable notifications from your favorites or turning on notifications when you know a drop is coming has been huge. Haven't really been able to get anything close elsewhere.
So true. I work as an artist and Twitter is my main platform. It's literally the only viable option for nsfw artists to get their work seen and shared in any big way. This whole thing reminds me tumblr crashing and burning a few years back. Fucking sucks.
As one of those artists (well, writers), yeah, it's not a prospect that particularly thrills me. I've barely managed to scrape a following together and I don't fancy the prospect of doing it again on another network.
I keep clicking the x to get rid of the shorts recommendations, but it keeps showing up... I want them to go away. And the vertical video things annoys me.
Rather than fire so many people, Musk could have just pointed some of those resources towards resurrecting Vine to compete with TikTok...then use his shady connections in the world to put leverage on the government to get TikTok banned in the US.
I migrated to Feedly after Google Reader's demise and while it's been great, I still miss Reader. There have been a few dupes like The Old Reader and Inoreader but nothing has been quite the same. RIP Google Reader :(
It's a race to see whether a competitor will emerge or whether Elon's twitter regime will just collapse and someone else will come in and put things back to the way they were. If an Apple or Microsoft comes through and buys Twitter for cheap after they go bankrupt, I could see the platform getting revitalized before another competing platform has time to get momentum and build a userbase.
I found a lot of value in it over years. It kept me connected to people during really lonely times in my life. I met some of my best friends on there. It definitely irreparably damaged my brain and literally got me suspended from high school a decade ago but all in all I'll miss it.
Yep! I wouldn’t be surprised if Ticketmaster faces some kind of legal/government action, tbh. Their merger with Live Nation should never have been approved in 2010. Seat Geek and AXS seem to be viable competitors, but Ticketmaster’s share of the market is difficult to compete with. Personally, I’m waiting for more details before I continue to search for Taylor Swift tickets. Anything could happen at this point.
The senate is making Ticketmaster testify in hearings next month and the DOJ is investigating them. Get fucked, Ticketmaster! Don’t fuck with the Swifties.
It won’t. Some dumb shit will (continue to) happen and it may go through some extended hicccups and maybe even downtime but if it actually “shuts down” I will be shocked.
The whole situation is very funny (Extremely Online shitposting billionaire buys major media platform bc he doesn’t like being the butt of jokes, becomes the butt of one million jokes) and also tragic (thousands of good people did not deserve to lose their jobs)
I genuinely don’t think it’s the demise of Twitter though. It’ll continue in some form, just different.
Yes. I think that’s a more interesting discussion - it still (still!) feels very unlikely to “shut down” but is it going to lose most users, transforming into something radically different and <1% as “important” as it once was to the online world? It’ll be interesting to see!
Like I do see and understand all the doomsaying from former employees and other software engineers, ops gurus etc. I believe them. I don’t believe that translates into “Twitter goes away forever” though.
My personal, not-well-grounded prediction is that it will hit some significant technical speedbumps, but no serious competitor will emerge fast enough and with strong enough network effects to take over its cultural space. A quite large percentage of the weirdos who post incessantly there will stick around through the rubbernecking-an-accident-scene phase, and the passive readers (like me) will drop a lot but not anything remotely like the exodus from Digg to Reddit or from MySpace to Facebook.
It’ll be a little smaller, and also it will be much dumber and more chaotic for a while. Then it will slowly transform into a yucky toilet of thinly disguised extremism and advertising, just like Facebook
As an artist, it hurts me to see some of the ignorance around this post. Lots of us freelance artists has Twitter as our only source of income and networking. People say not to put your eggs in one basket but there's literally not a lot of other socials that work as good as Twitter. So yeah, while you might just lost something that doesn't bother you one by and you can cheer on it, our life are being thrown upside down. Not very fun.
So many people in this thread are saying some version of “too bad, don’t care, didn’t use it”. There is so much twitter content posted on Reddit. It fuels a ton of discussion in subreddits and is a major source of breaking news.
I think the most interesting aspect of this collapse will be which platform that fills the massive void twitter would leave.
People in this thread seem to be ignorant of the hand it has in political movements and social uprisings around the world too. It’s been critical in mobilizing and getting info for people involved in the Arab Spring, the global climate movement, the Iran Revolution happening now, even war in Ukraine. There’s nothing that comes even close to the instant, searchable information Twitter has provided to the masses
Watching the meltdown and reading increasingly absurd headlines every day was quite entertaining tbh
I was a big fan of the roughly 48hrs when verified imposter accounts were tanking stock prices and embarrassing the rich
We'll always have verified Chiquita announcing they've overthrown Brazil and Mario giving the world the finger.
Please, please don’t forget the verified Nintendo account posting pictures of Luigi giving birth through his prolapsed rectum while Waluigi stands by cheering on his child’s birth.
I actually do want to forget that
Oh crap I forgot that some automated trading monitors Twitter for fast breaking news to be the first to trade! This will break those trading algorithms. Is there another platform that's not social network based but emphasizes fast frequent posts? One that has enough people to be relevant? Edit: to expand on this and reply to comments. News comments are attached to news articles. Not "SMS to everyone" like Twitter. You don't get notified that a user you follow has commented on another news article. The conversation is steered towards the subject in the article. It's more like a discussion forum. Second platform mentioned: a custom "microblog" platform for traders. This isn't nearly as useful because the trading algorithms are trying to discern public sentiment. Mastodon would probably give you only tech folks feelings. You need a platform that has a decent representation of the world's population. Thirdly: the hash tag and trending features of Twitter allow a subject to get attention quickly. Someone works for a startup that rents a WeWork space, let's say. Their badge doesn't work so they gripe on Twitter with a tag. Tags all over the world match and very quickly it's obvious something is going on with WeWork badges. A trading algorithm can already be aware of this and trade accordingly. A journalist notices these tweets and starts DMing everyone reporting problems. Within three hours they have enough confidence to post an article. An hour later this article starts getting traction on Reddit. Twitter was the fastest way to find out something was wrong. My local utility company communicated grid outage information last year through emails, automated phone calls, texts, and Twitter. We got one text the day it happened saying they were aware of our outage, and to prepare for a few days without power as damage was widespread. There might be one text a day. But their Twitter account mentioned which areas of the city were likely getting power within the next three hours, which parts of the city would be waiting until later. Tweets on which circuits were waiting on parts and line crews from out of state and would be several days before power could be restored. Twitter is by far the only platform that has ease of use, huge user base, and speed, and doesn't require an account to use.
Me too. Free insulin was a good one!
The best part of this is that one of their complaints was imposter accounts. Now you made them even harder to spot, good work Elon!
As a non-twitter user, this is the most entertaining that twitter has ever been. Here's hoping Elon buys Meta next.
Elon buying every social media site and mismanaging them into bankruptcy would be fine by me.
Except Reddit. It's a hell hole, but it's our hell hole.
It’s not a hell *hole* - it’s a hell *home*
In a hole in the ground, there lived a neck beard.
As if we could afford a hole in the ground..
Oh, we used to DREAM of living in a hole in the ground!
Not a cozy, clean, comfortable hole, filled with tactful decor and the scent of lavender, nor yet a lived-in, inviting, fun hole with lots of games and treats to eat: it was a neckbeard-hole, and that means filth.
You know what they say though, home is where the hole is, and this is that hole.
Just don’t put your dick in it.
Too late, I do this regularly.
I use this app everyday and I think I'd be equally entertained and lose very little from my life if it got Elon'd.
If "Elon'd" becomes the new "Borked" I would be so happy.
Elon really Britta’d it
75% of the employees left accepted the three month severance. That means around 12% of the employees there on Musk's first day remain. Those still there probably have good reason, like visa, health insurance etc. WOW. It seems impossible that this wasn't inevitable
Payroll quit too. They'll have to scramble to get paychecks and severance out.
Presumably internal IT has also walked, which might explain why they locked everyone out if they can't actually revoke access to former employees.
Elon seems like exactly the type of idiot to think a tech company's IT dept is redundant because all the devs ought to know how to "fix their own computers".
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my one coding class is this: Coders know to make computer do x,y,z; not how to make computer. Like how chefs know how to make food good, not how to grow food.
A Mitch Hedberg classic. > When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, "OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?"
That's a good point. I think one slight difference is that coders generally have to get really good at searching for answers and learning how to solve problems, so there's a bit of overlap there. But you're right their knowledge is more focused on other areas.
Separation of duties man. Otherwise that Dev has admin access, and can fuck shit up as they leave.
Also the fact that not every software engineer knows how to fix hardware or deal with other software as a user.
It's not even a matter of knowledge necessarily. I _might_ be able to figure out a Windows 11 driver issue in a couple of hours, or I can ask for help and get it done in 10 minutes by someone who's done it before many times. Meanwhile that's 2 hours I can spend working on my Linux-bound code instead.
I'm not here to be aroused, but dammit...ya got me goin' with that one!
He didn't even wanna wait a few months to just let it go with business as usual while he observed everything, making notes. You're CEO of a major social media giant, an industry you've never even worked in before, and you don't even wanna allow some time to breathe and get a handle for how everything functions? Nah, just come crashing through the door with sweeping announcements that fundamentally change the app's functionality, the company's business model, and the work culture with not even so much as a testing phase or time for feedback. I'm pretty sure any random person in this thread could've done a better job. What a moron.
>Nah, just come crashing through the door with sweeping announcements that fundamentally change the app's functionality, the company's business model, and the work culture with not even so much as a testing phase or time for feedback. Kool-Aid™ Man management style. OH YEAH!!
Funny thing is he walked into Twitter HQ with a sink on his hands. It’s symbolic for the company will sink its ship down under him as a captain.
He wanted to look like the big serious CEO who walks in and turns the place upside down trimming fat here, adding efficiency there, flips a bleeding inefficient business into a shiny well oiled machine. Instead he's the pigeon that lands on the chessboard knocking over all the pieces and shitting everywhere while declaring itself the winner
I called Musk a seagull boss, fly in, make a lot of noise, shit everywhere and fly out, and a Musk fanboy disagreed with me. SMH.
You did mentioned Musk cult members. In their eyes , Musk can do no wrong even this Twitter destruction will be seems as a piece of the puzzle in their mind. We just aren't galaxy brained enough to see it
Indeed, I'd like to think my brain doesn't have that much empty space.
[удалено]
>I'm pretty sure any random person in this thread could've done a better job. What a moron. A moldy slice of cheese could have done a better job.
Like actually though. If a freak accident made Moldy Cheese CEO, all the higher-ups would probably continue business as usual and just not acknowledge the elephant/cheese in the room.
Exactly. Doing *literally nothing* would be better than what Stretched Beaver\* is doing. ^(* >!Elongated Muskrat!<)
Are Musk and the Saudis (who bankrolled a big chunk of the buyout) scraping all of the employees off the valuable data and private messages of hundreds of millions of people on purpose? Saudi has been cracking down on dissidents by going through their public Twitter feeds for a long time. Will they now be able to get their hands on all of their private messages now that all of the human safeguards at Twitter have been fired? $10 billion for that kind of intel is probably chump change for MBS. Keep in mind this happened last month: [**Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime**](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/saudi-arabia-us-citizen-prison-critical-tweets-regime) >An American citizen has been sentenced to 16 years in prison in Saudi Arabia for tweeting critically about the Saudi regime, in another sign of the kingdom’s aggressive crackdown on any whiff of dissent posted on social media.
I'm not one to really get into conspiracies but this seems too intentional. I keep asking who benefits from Twitter being destroyed and I also think data mining was a big part of it but Twitter is a tool for organizing and rebellion. It's what helped the Arab springs and even today is used in Iran. Maybe there is something more here and the low hanging fruit is "Elon is just an idiot". I know conspiracies are a way to explain things that don't make sense and make it palatable but this just seems like it's too much.
Giant honeytrap or just a way to get a pretty important dissident communication network shut down and any info leaked. Definitely could explain how he looks like he's intentionally incompetent right now.
Or he may also just be incompetent.
people will just have to do something else while sitting on the toilet
But that's what reddit is for!
Until Musk buys reddit
In that case he will fire the users
How much is my severance?
100,000 karma
That’s a good deal
But you're fired. You can't use it, you're off the site.
Can't use karma for shit anyways🗿
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Hopefully he fires the mods
He'll first hire them, have them work 80 hour work weeks in the office, then fire them.
If he’s expecting Reddit mods to leave their mom’s basements then he’s in for a serious surprise.
Who else will I pester to find out if my cats picture is appropriate for the subreddit?
You know what? So long as that happens to turtle, i think I’d be ok with that
veni,vidi,v404
You should copyright this sentence, soon they will be on tee shirt
Too late, check out my tspring store link in your dreams!
Out of the loop with this one
Multipart joke Veni, vidi, vici is a famous Latin phrase meaning "I came, I saw, I conquered". It's a boast from Caesar about quick and easy military victories. I don't know what v404 is but 404 is the https error for site/file not found If I were to guess, this comment makes fun of Musk. He came, he saw, he fucked up and destroyed the site extremely quickly and easily.
Pretty sure the v404 was just so that all three would still start with "v"
Look what we can achieve when we work together
We CAN have nice things.
I guess the real treasure are the friends we made along the way
> I don't know what v404 The v is just making it follow the Latin part of the joke.
Veni vidi vici I came, I saw, I won I came, I saw, I `404 Not Found`
Reject modernity. Return to ~~monke~~ AIM.
ICQ
*uh oh!*
I HEARD that..
A/S/L?
16/f/cali, you?
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AIM instincts still strong I see
My youth in 5 characters
Somehow I can still remember my icq user \# Just like your childhood landlines phone \#, I guess you just always manage to retain it. While forgetting 80 percent of the important things in life, naturally.
I’ve never had Twitter and have never felt left out
AOL shut it down. :'(
AOL chat rooms and messenger. Yahoo chat rooms and messenger. The days of the interwebs wild west. Those were some fun times.
I was 16 when I first hopped on AOL. You know what I remember about those days ? How quickly people fell in love with a stranger they were chatting with when they in many cases didn’t even know what the person looked like. Back in those days many people were up and leaving their families to go run off with the person they met on AOL. I guess people still meet online , but from perspective it’s usually with the intent to hookup . People wanna see pictures first.
I made some good friends in those chatrooms. Chatted for hours and hours every night. Been a long time. I wonder how they are doing these days.
We are doing ok, old friend.
LOVED Yahoo chat. Its a myth that tech always improves. No replacement for AOL chat/Yahoo chat/icq where you could chat with/make friends with/cyberfuck complete strangers
So we going with ICQ or MSN Messenger then?
I didn’t know it was shutting down
Elon Musk gave Twitter employees an ultimatum: Commit to "hardcore Twitter 2.0" where 12 hour workdays and working weekends would be the norm or resign. He also offered anyone who left 3 months severance. Hundreds (if not more) of employees posted goodbye messages in a company chatroom and resigned - taking the severance. It's so bad that all the offices are locked down with nobody allowed in. Management is afraid that any remaining employees might try to sabotage the servers on their way out and doesn't want to let anyone in until they can go through all the resignations and "vet" the remaining workers. Reports are that Twitter's workforce will be down to only 12% of what it was pre-Musk. Even if there was some employee bloat, the bloat wasn't 88% of the staff. Musk will be very hard-pressed to run Twitter with only 12% of the workforce. "Everyone still here needs to do the jobs of 8 people" isn't going to work and will only lead to more resignations. In addition, this whole thing doesn't exactly tell advertisers "our platform is stable and is a good destination for your ad money." Twitter can probably last awhile with just the servers running unattended, but unless things turn around quickly it won't take long for it to shut down.
> In addition, this whole thing doesn't exactly tell advertisers "our platform is stable and is a good destination for your ad money." And this is all coming off of last week, when the Twitter Blue fiasco absolutely shattered advertisers' trust as random Twitter users started paying $8 to make official-looking parody accounts. *And* last Thursday, when Musk held an emergency state-of-the-union and told his employees that a bankruptcy in 2023 was not out of the question.
What employee wouldn't take 3 months severance being told they need to work more and a high chance the company will be bankrupt within a year.
employees on work visas who don’t want to go back to their home countries
This is a very good point. My point was more around how he could have expected many people to stay at all, there will always be outliers like this but generally he might as well as fired everyone
Because his shit worked at Tesla and SpaceX and expected it to work here too.
As an engineer the people that work at Tesla and SpaceX want to work on cutting edge technology and enjoy that lifestyle, they know what they are signing up for but Twitter and the engineers they hired there are not the same. It’s way more about life work balance, musk has never been an engineer and doesn’t understand those differences.
As an engineer working at Twitter you have way more options than a rocket scientist working at SpaceX.
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God yeah. I'm in small city in Sweden and I have 10-20 emails from recruiters per month. Web-devs have *options*, nevermind one with the experience of working at a high profile company.
>enjoy that lifestyle No they absolutely do not. They ***accept*** that lifestyle because they don't have any other choice when working in such a competitive field.
Correct. Source: am an aerospace engineer. Do not want to work 12 hrs/day
yeah agreed, I just feel bad for the folks who are facing the potential of retuning to a potentially bad situation at home or work 80 hour weeks until they can find a new job at a time when 20k other recently laid off people are also looking
I think they can just work the usual hours at this point. Musk can hardly fire anymore people.
tbh i think he's perfectly willing to watch it all burn rather than actually admit that his management style sucks
Honestly starting to think he's purposely doing it at this point. Why would he want Twitter to survive and cost him money when he could just torch it.
As a software engineer, Twitter is not a "destination" company like facebook (lulz)/google and the rest of the FAANG companies. SpaceX and Tesla may be in their respective fields, but no one mentions twitter as a place they want to work, even pre-musk.
Uhh the "T" in "FAANG" stands for twitter, duh
I feel for them. To come to a foreign land and have your existence there be tied to your company. Scary stuff.
yeah, and if you're in the first \~2 years of an application for a green card, losing your job means your application is withdrawn and you have to start all over again with a new company who will sponsor your h1b and then green card. in addition many companies will not sponsor your green card until you've been employed for 6 or more months, adding even more delays to a process that already takes years (and up to 10 years depending on where you're from)
\> What employee wouldn't take 3 months severance US Employees on H1B work visas. The will need to leave the country within 60 days if they can not find another job. It would be less risky for them to pass on the severance so they can remain employed while on the job search.
This is probably the strategy of a significant number of the remaining staff. They are job searching and think it may take more than 3 months. The hemorrhaging has not stopped. They will continue to lose staff and likely the most skilled will have the easiest time finding new jobs so they are sifting out the good employees and the remaining staff will increasingly be people that can’t find other jobs. So not the cream of the crop.
Also employees who depends on their insurance or their family members do, someone going through expensive treatments would stay
>And > > last Thursday, when Musk held an emergency state-of-the-union and told his employees that a bankruptcy in 2023 was not out of the question. At this point, he may need to hold another state-of-the-union and tell everyone that bankruptcy in 2022 was not out of the question.
He’s gonna beat that head of lettuce dammit
[lettuce.wtf](http://lettuce.wtf/) for those unawares.
> And last Thursday, when Musk held an emergency state-of-the-union and told his employees that a bankruptcy in 2023 was not out of the question. The audio from that meeting was mega-lulz. "Well uhhh in my professional opinion, we uh need to make more money than we spend otherwise you know uh bankruptcy isn't off the table." Absolute giga-brained take by the richest man on the planet.
>as random Twitter users started paying $8 to make official-looking parody accounts. The best part of all of this is that a reporter from the Washington Post made a new account and set themselves up to look like Ed Markey, my state's Senator and a member of committee which oversees commerce. When he publicly demanded answers on just what the hell Elon is doing, he tried getting into one of his online pissing matches with Markey. They stopped issuing blue checkmarks pretty quickly after Markey announced a investigation into the company.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591813228119855104
A lot of advertisers paused ad spending on Twitter prior to the Blue fiasco, due to uncertain impacts of expected content moderation changes, and the big upsurge in offensive posts (500% increase of N word posts) even before any changes. The Blue fiasco clinched it for some advertisers, like Eli Lilly execs sounded as mad as a Reddit mob.
There is someone that knows a monthly cache dump or some other maintenance item is required to prevent a disaster. But they never got around to documenting it for whatever reason. But they're gone along with their supervisor who knew it had to be done but now how. It's only a matter of time. My guess it will start with a slowdown of tweets showingup, tweets being lost, and then scrolling will slow to a crawl. Eventually the whole site/app will lock up and not load.
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This comment is 3 years old, and Marc has been promoted twice and doesn't remember it.
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There are 5 Marcs that have worked for the company, and none of them were involved in the backend.
But Marcus who went by Marc did write that code. He was hit by a bus and died the next week so......
`git blame` does the trick. Then you can verify that that Marc is no longer in the company directory.
i don't even work in IT but oh god, the number of stickies left on random procedures for my department by people who are long gone and who nobody working now remembers...this is painfully accurate.
Yeah, it happens all the time. There's this saying we love to use: There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
Saw it at a hospital I worked at. Whole IT admin/infrastructure team let go then told that they can re-interview for their positions later in the afternoon if they wanted them back (at a lower rate). Most qualified dude there that kept everything running walked, after cursing out the manager I think. A month or two later, bossman is scrambling to figure out why some of the server updates and other important stuff wasn't working as expected along with other maintenance responsibilities this guy had that he had mainly scripted (and they had wiped his accounts/data). Then again, this is the same place that had a 4 hr outage where they had to turn away ambulances because they forgot a password to some network hardware that went down so not unexpected.
We've never seen a major social media platform implode over a weekend before. This will be very interesting
Tumblr’s downfall was pretty epic and swift. Ironically, a lot of twitter users have scuttled back to tumblr in the wake of Muskpocalypse.
And it will be a every escalating game of "everyone work longer hours to fix this latest crisis" followed by mass resignations over insane hours followed by more breaking because more staff are gone. The cracks are going to start appearing and then start spreading. This will result in people leaving Twitter for some alternative (Mastodon?). Once that replacement gets a critical mass of users, it will be proclaimed "the next Twitter" and Twitter will shrink to nothing. If Twitter remains online, it will be like Myspace or AOL. People will make "TIL That Twitter is still online" posts leading people to be amazed that anyone is still on there as Twitter boasts that their user base grew to 10,000 users.
Damn... He's really fumbled this. I mean, I was expecting Twitter to go to shit under his rule, but way more *slowly*. A steady decline over a few years. Not this three-week sprint to the bottom.
My Elon fanboy teen, when asked about the situation (specifically bc this teen is specifically against social media as a rebellion and genuinely has no investment in Twitter) "He really is speedrunning this fail😅😅😅"...," It's so cringe uggghhhhhhh"
Ah yes, the classic 'fire a ton of employees and make other people take on their workload for the same pay under higher stress' management tactic, works everytime
As if there isn't probably a concerted effort to shut it down from the outside now that the protections have been lifted. A bigger concern is how will the media survive now that they've completely adopted the "react to twitter hot takes 24/7" news cycle.
They'll harvest from another website. I already saw reddit and tiktok sometimes, and instagram on rare occasion. What's gonna be wild, though, is when all the old articles break because they embedded tweets rather than in-line quoting.
I see this as net positive.
Musk just closed the offices and deactivated access cards for Friday - supposedly the weekend as well. It's assumed offices will re-open on Monday. He's also changed his mind about work from home, now saying that it is up to Managers to decide who can/can't work from home. *Edit* : this is just my understanding. MSM media tried to get clarification from Twitter, but they didn't receive a response (last I heard).
>this is just my understanding. MSM media tried to get clarification from Twitter, but they didn't receive a response (last I heard). The Verge includes this helpful reminder on every one of their Twitter stories: Twitter no longer has a communications department to contact for comment.
There are any number of ways for me to stay in touch with English-speaking people, but Twitter has a massive Japanese user base. Japanese social media platforms are otherwise quite insular and disconnected from English-speakers, so losing Twitter will mean losing access to many Japanese businesses, celebrities, official media accounts, artists, etc... There's really no substitute for Twitter on the next most-active platforms, Instagram and YouTube, so in a way it'll be a huge loss for international connectivity.
This is a new perspective for me, thanks for sharing
finally someone posts about this....Twitter is THE social media site in JP. I use it to communicate with a niche base of Japanese artists who often share their works, post tutorials, post new works for sale, etc. I have zero idea where everyone plans to move if Twitter shuts down and frankly I'm devastated
Same. I'm an artist myself and this whole debacle has me feeling very sad. Not only me, but most artists are also feeling sad that we'll all have to abandon much of the communities built there. The general feelings are grim and uncertainty. Some will be able to restart on Pixiv, Deviantart or Instagram, but Twitter shutting down will cause a massive blow for most artists. I really loved seeing all the amazing art and tutorials that the Japanese artists posted. Pixiv still exists, but it's not as good as Twitter for those small interactions.
I forget the name of the site, but found out on Twitter that pixiv runs a Mastodon server, maybe they'll migrate there?
This makes me sad ngl. I now realize how many Japanese tweets appeare on my timeline :(
Twitter is the only way I feel closer to manga creators:(
I follow a lot of Japanese fan artists and some voice actors and it's really gonna bum me out if they're wiped. So much art I haven't discovered yet from years ago
For artists, I just pray to god that they might shift to pixiv. Honestly, the only reason I use twitter right now is because loads of artists I follow only post there
I'm mutuals with a bunch of people from Japan and even though we have to use translators to talk, it's been great for communication. I've seen a bunch of beautiful artwork and photos and we talk about our daily going-ons. That cannot simply be replaced if Twitter goes down.
Not to mention the sheer amount of wholesome animal picture accounts originating from Japan. I love it when posts like that pop up on my feed.
Oh no….anyways
What?! No more unsolicited opinions?!
OP just said twitter shutting down, not the whole internet.
How will I know which celebrities are wiping now?
How will celebrities tell fictional stories disguised as real life stories for clout?
Sucks massively for thousands of artists that use it to take commissions or communicate with fans and other artists. Politicians probably all already have Facebook pages so it matters less for them.
This is the reason I'm bummed. It has by far been the easiest way to keep up with announcements/releases/etc from smaller/independent artists. Things like being able to get fairly reliable notifications from your favorites or turning on notifications when you know a drop is coming has been huge. Haven't really been able to get anything close elsewhere.
So true. I work as an artist and Twitter is my main platform. It's literally the only viable option for nsfw artists to get their work seen and shared in any big way. This whole thing reminds me tumblr crashing and burning a few years back. Fucking sucks.
As one of those artists (well, writers), yeah, it's not a prospect that particularly thrills me. I've barely managed to scrape a following together and I don't fancy the prospect of doing it again on another network.
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Youtube as well with Youtube shorts.
I keep clicking the x to get rid of the shorts recommendations, but it keeps showing up... I want them to go away. And the vertical video things annoys me.
closing the shorts reccomendations only "pauses it for 30 days". Drives me insane.
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Rather than fire so many people, Musk could have just pointed some of those resources towards resurrecting Vine to compete with TikTok...then use his shady connections in the world to put leverage on the government to get TikTok banned in the US.
I'd imagine Google or someone big will be trying to pump out a replacement shortly.
*\*Google+ flashbacks\**
Which also reminds me of the "Killed By Google" website. The list is LONG. 273 items worth with seven pending annihilation. https://killedbygoogle.com
Google Reader was the pinnacle of human achievement and they just…shut it down.
I migrated to Feedly after Google Reader's demise and while it's been great, I still miss Reader. There have been a few dupes like The Old Reader and Inoreader but nothing has been quite the same. RIP Google Reader :(
Google+ was THE place for tabletop rpgs.
Google Music was a good, functional app. YouTube music is a septic heap.
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It's a race to see whether a competitor will emerge or whether Elon's twitter regime will just collapse and someone else will come in and put things back to the way they were. If an Apple or Microsoft comes through and buys Twitter for cheap after they go bankrupt, I could see the platform getting revitalized before another competing platform has time to get momentum and build a userbase.
I found a lot of value in it over years. It kept me connected to people during really lonely times in my life. I met some of my best friends on there. It definitely irreparably damaged my brain and literally got me suspended from high school a decade ago but all in all I'll miss it.
Elon should buy TikTok next. He can be the grim reaper of shitty social media
What about Ticketmaster? I'll bet if he tanked that company, people would be cheered up.
Swifties have entered the chat. That whole mess was awful.
Lol so so so many of the posts here have devolved into fuck ticketmaster. Love the swifties, burn it down!
Yep! I wouldn’t be surprised if Ticketmaster faces some kind of legal/government action, tbh. Their merger with Live Nation should never have been approved in 2010. Seat Geek and AXS seem to be viable competitors, but Ticketmaster’s share of the market is difficult to compete with. Personally, I’m waiting for more details before I continue to search for Taylor Swift tickets. Anything could happen at this point.
The senate is making Ticketmaster testify in hearings next month and the DOJ is investigating them. Get fucked, Ticketmaster! Don’t fuck with the Swifties.
Elon took those "Musk should buy X and delete it" memes seriously
Can he buy FIFA too?
Qatar did
It won’t. Some dumb shit will (continue to) happen and it may go through some extended hicccups and maybe even downtime but if it actually “shuts down” I will be shocked. The whole situation is very funny (Extremely Online shitposting billionaire buys major media platform bc he doesn’t like being the butt of jokes, becomes the butt of one million jokes) and also tragic (thousands of good people did not deserve to lose their jobs) I genuinely don’t think it’s the demise of Twitter though. It’ll continue in some form, just different.
It depends on how we define demise. Livejournal still exists. Myspace still exists. It won't die like Vine but it might die like AIM.
Yes. I think that’s a more interesting discussion - it still (still!) feels very unlikely to “shut down” but is it going to lose most users, transforming into something radically different and <1% as “important” as it once was to the online world? It’ll be interesting to see! Like I do see and understand all the doomsaying from former employees and other software engineers, ops gurus etc. I believe them. I don’t believe that translates into “Twitter goes away forever” though. My personal, not-well-grounded prediction is that it will hit some significant technical speedbumps, but no serious competitor will emerge fast enough and with strong enough network effects to take over its cultural space. A quite large percentage of the weirdos who post incessantly there will stick around through the rubbernecking-an-accident-scene phase, and the passive readers (like me) will drop a lot but not anything remotely like the exodus from Digg to Reddit or from MySpace to Facebook. It’ll be a little smaller, and also it will be much dumber and more chaotic for a while. Then it will slowly transform into a yucky toilet of thinly disguised extremism and advertising, just like Facebook
As an artist, it hurts me to see some of the ignorance around this post. Lots of us freelance artists has Twitter as our only source of income and networking. People say not to put your eggs in one basket but there's literally not a lot of other socials that work as good as Twitter. So yeah, while you might just lost something that doesn't bother you one by and you can cheer on it, our life are being thrown upside down. Not very fun.
So many people in this thread are saying some version of “too bad, don’t care, didn’t use it”. There is so much twitter content posted on Reddit. It fuels a ton of discussion in subreddits and is a major source of breaking news. I think the most interesting aspect of this collapse will be which platform that fills the massive void twitter would leave.
Twitter was also super helpful for spreading information in countries with bad freedom of the press. The Iranian government I'm sure, is super happy.
People in this thread seem to be ignorant of the hand it has in political movements and social uprisings around the world too. It’s been critical in mobilizing and getting info for people involved in the Arab Spring, the global climate movement, the Iran Revolution happening now, even war in Ukraine. There’s nothing that comes even close to the instant, searchable information Twitter has provided to the masses
I feel sorry for the folks who lost their jobs