What Is Happening in Silicon Valley if I Don’t Tell Someone to Print Out Their Code? An Empirical Report on Silicon Valley Tech News
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. It may have contained mistakes, even though it has been reviewed by humans. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.
We try to bring people news from other parts of the tech industry, and give a more in-depth sense of what is happening in Silicon Valley. Right now, the only news that anyone in tech cares about is what is happening on the side of a street in San Francisco.
And we should say up front, like, these voices — they’re not going to sound 100 percent exactly human. It’s going to be a little weird and, frankly, robotic. But just remember, as you listen, that these words were spoken by actual human Twitter employees, and that this is really the only way to get them on the record and get a real picture of what’s happening inside Twitter right now.
So what we’re going to do is talk to them, like have a normal interview. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.
When we conceived of this show, we said we would never use an artificial intelligence voice unless there was a really good reason to do so. And now, twice in five episodes.
You were wrong about this being a show not filled with robot people, and you were also wrong about the buying ofTwitter. That’s two strikes for him.
Yeah. Sometimes, as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds like a joke and you think it could not possibly be true. I was told that the people in charge of code had told everyone to print out their code for the last 30 to 60 days.
And in fact, two of my sources are like, uh, Casey, that doesn’t sound right to me. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!
What is funny about this? Why is this interesting? It is not normal to evaluate how good a software engineer is. People are not evaluated based on how much code they write.
If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? Sort of streamlining it. So.
Who is responsible for printing code? Like, it’s not like — like, I was surprised that the coding programs actually have a Print button in them. Because that’s, like, not what you’re bringing to your daily review of your code.
Why Twitter isn’t Changing, and How to Make It Work for a Big Tech Company: Why Is Twitter Down? How Do Users Should Have Their Codes Shredded?
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. Engineering responded to the problem with a variety of “crap” and “Twitter is down, the entire thing” as they worked to fix it.
It is just two hours later when they get the new notification. It’s like, change of plans. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. Don’t bring it with you, we need you to shred it if you printed it out.
Everyone is joking about the boss in charge who appears to have no idea what he is doing. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.
It is not. Now, one thing that we should say is that the Elon folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? At the altar of the engineer, Elon worships very much. He sees himself as an engineer.
I have spoken to a few people who are getting calls late at night from randomTesla engineers, who asked, “Who is really good on your team?” Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?
This exercise is ridiculous and part of a larger evaluation system where they want to figure out who at the company they need to keep the service running.
Who can we let go of? That’s sort of the unspoken piece of this. So we have a problem with code printing. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.
Many people subscribe to the service, but it has not been a major source of revenue. The people who are under the most pressure to make money in a hurry have been looking for new revenue ideas. And one revenue idea that came up, basically right away, was to make people pay for Twitter Blue in order to keep their verification badges.
If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that’s $38 million a year, roughly. Second-quarter revenue was over a billion dollars. So this is a drop in the bucket, even if everyone who is currently verified on Twitter pays $8 a month, which I don’t think they will.
Yeah. Stephen King, the celebrated author, asked if he could pay $20 a month to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Stephen King was afraid of paying $20 a month for his verification badges when he wrote about some of the most frightening horrors imaginable.
And then, say, you get even that many more new people who are paying to get verified for the first time. You have about one million people paying for verification. About 80 million a year is not much for a company like Twitter.
And I think that’s how a lot of journalists get verified. But there’s also a process. You can ask to be verified if you’re a celebrity or something. And the reason the verification exists, we should say — like, it’s not about a status marker.
It’s not about who this person is. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. It was necessary to give users a way to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they claimed to be.
This is a necessary part of the platform and I think it is important. Every platform that is social in some way has this feature, right? You need to demonstrate that this is the real Oprah and that it isn’t the real Oprah.
Right. Over the years, people have come to see these check marks next to your name as sort of a status symbol, right? Like, it means that you’re someone, it means that it —
Right, exactly. I think the idea was that those who were verified cared a lot about being verified and staying verified, so they would pay for the privilege. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.
Almost immediately, that starts to affect the whole social network, where users say no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. That’s more than I pay for YouTube.
Like, just to keep my little check mark — like, that seems insane. On the same day, Stephen King wrote a reply to Elon which said that we need to pay the bills. Advertising can’t be relied on completely by a social media network. What about $8? So Stephen King has become the pricing consultant for Twitter verification.
The idea of blue checks, I think that there’s a lot of right-wing circles in the world of Elon, and I think it’s because of that. People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of, like, blue check mob of people on Twitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are sort of, like, self-important and care very deeply about their checkmarks.
And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.
Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. It’s not just making people pay to keep their badge. You could get a Badge if you pay.
I seem to be trying to keep an open mind. This could work. I believe some of the features that are being talked about should be paid for by people who use the micro-messaging service.
It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It matters to us. News organizations use software solutions that help them do a lot of things. Is there a possibility that Twitter Blue should be part of that?
I don’t know if it’s a legacy verification program or something else, but they might have one for government entities that won’t pay the $8 a month. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: Where Do We Stand? Where Are We Going? What Can We Expect to Learn From Facebook and YouTube?
It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company.
For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. Similarly, the culture has also moved on. It is a steep hill to think that a 10 year old code base will be revived and turned into a TikTok competitor.
I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? They are going to have to put a lot of effort into it. A new social network is about to be launched. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. But we’ll just have to see if they can do it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: What Are They Really Looking For? What Happens When You Get Your Co-workers?
That is correct. They’re being told, you have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. You will be fired if the deadline is more than an hour past.
So people are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them have work visas. If they lose their job, they have 60 day to find another one or they can leave the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.
Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. Right now, it is about 10:00 AM Pacific. How is your day going? Is anything noteworthy happening today?
The last week seems to be the same day after day with everyone waking up to more panicked messages. I think most people have been smart enough to move off of Slack and into other channels. And it is this up-and-down of trying to chase rumors, because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.
Stressful. I feel like I have a lot of stress going on between trying to maintain this job and also looking for a way out, because of the support and acknowledgment from people above me. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.
First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.
We have some money that we can put to use. Some people don’t. It is very nerve-racking knowing as we enter a very tough hiring market in tech. We are entering the holidays.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Organization called “SIGHs” (Missing Two Twitter Employees Say Out)
So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.
That is correct. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.
And so what is that like, when, day to day, you wake up, and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing?
You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I have seen people say code was written by them, but not crediting the people who collaborated with them, hoping that they will be included on a preferred status list.
Absolutely. Quality isn’t what they are asking for. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. There is an organization called the “SIGHs.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees “Speak Out”, a Pseudo-Nymous Conversation about What Happens at Your Company
I reported on a message from a manager who told me to work on something if I didn’t know what I was working on. Work on anything.
I want to learn more about the person who sent me from Blind. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.
There are multiple people sending this post. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. And I’m not going to read the whole thing. But the headline is “I can’t cope.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
What I am Doning on the Twitter Group: I’m just a few days late but I need to stop thinking about what happened and what I can do
And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. We are gone if we takePTO or leave.
People are working ridiculous hours. I work 20 hours a day at full speed. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. I can always think about it even when I am not working. I can’t cope. I’m an absolute mess. I am at a point of no return. This is after just a few days of being in the same place.
There are two separate groups of people on the social networking site, the ones who are being ignored and the ones that are being pulled into task forces. I think the better place is to be in the people who are being ignored and will be fired.
The Heart of a Democrat: How to Help a Person who’s on a Visa to Come to the United States and What They Can Do to Help
My heart goes out to this person. I hope they can get a job in four hours, while they’re trying to sleep and take care of themselves.
And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.
So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because we’re moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who want to come to this country and have gainful employment and are skilled, who are ready to join the country.
On one level, it’s just a job to work at Twitter. There is a sense of inspiration that comes from the fact that the company does want to give more people a voice and that they want to do it in a democratized way.
Does Twitter Have a Role in Overcoming Musk’s Takeover? Why I’m Embarrased? What I Don’t Know about Twitter
So I do not think, though, it is because engineers and people are sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. So there is some truth to that statement. This is not the best way to deal with it.
I have wondered if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk and what your fears are about the future of the service.
I would love to think that everybody on Twitter is going to leave in protest. But the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.
We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. The most ardent users of the service are unlikely to leave in large numbers. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. It’s not as bad for social media as quiet quitting would be.
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Analysis at the Tevatron Detector (VLT) in Lattice Research
Surrounded by fear and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. I hope that all of us who are fired will just be able to take a break, and then go get that resume out there, because I think it’s crucial that we get that resume out there. Right now it’s sucking the life out of us, so we have to be rejuvenated about these other jobs.
There is uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. It leads to constant stress, because we don’t have all the information we need, with a pile of unknowns and things reported on.
Privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features are raised in the lowest parts of engineering. Their only work is to write random code that nobody will see, like the piping behind the scenes. The company’s culture was to allow people to speak to these things. It catches us on issues before they ever make it to the public.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Have They Learned About a General Manager of a Billion Dollar Company?
That’s complicated because no one really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. A lot of people were of the opinion that this should have been banned many years ago for his behavior. Everything came from there.
I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.
I will say, having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways, and some not so good. I don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Delivery may be too slow. The company has never put management at its strong point.
You have to have massive structural change to go through a change like this. What is the point if he just came in and did the same thing?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaking Out: I Don’t Know if Elon is going to Ship That Thing by Next Monday
So, OK? There is an idea thatTwitter should be quicker than it has been. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?
I lose my mind. I mean, having a three – to four-day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday, that’s normal. That is a bit of a strain. Might put in a couple extra hours. It is important to get it done. Makes sense.
But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. That’s just completely absurd.
And the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that have to be dragged in, that’s like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.
It’s not as if there is just a certain set of code that needs to be written You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?
Yeah. For example, if you look at the feature sets that he wants to add in, for example, ranking blue check users higher than other users, where that ranking occurs in the stack is something you can see. They need to completely change how that entire process works. The whole services in the company have to be figured out.
Yeah. What time frame would it take you to redo the account, so that it resembles a reasonable amount of time?
It depends. The infrastructure changes would probably take a long time because of the slow nature of the platform. We are more concerned with reliability than moving fast.
But feature-wise, I guess if I had to give a round-about time frame, there would probably be something that could possibly be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Are They Really Trying To Tell Us About It? An Empirical Analysis
This is an engineering problem and it is also a social problem. We have to do testing. It is necessary to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? The bros will try to steal more people’s money using this feature.
Right. All major releases at a social network are trying to figure out how to change this feature and how to make other changes. It looks like the deadlines might be so short that it will be possible for this stuff to be released without any testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They’re just going to be set loose.
Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. It’s a blue check on a profile.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk and His Inner Circle: Vine, Not TikTok, or What Do We Need to Do to Preserve the Vine?
So there’s a couple of things. Depending on where you’re in the leadership stack, it can be either Musk or his people. One overarching message that did get communicated was, find something that you like. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.
Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.
God. I’m curious what you make of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Elon Musk and his inner circle, such as the charging $8 a month for Twitter verification, bringing back Vine. What do you make of those proposals? Do you think they are good?
The first thing he did was change the view on the log-in screen to the Explore page. I am not sure, but I think we may be able to serve ads to people who are not registered with us.
If you go to the site but are not registered, they’ll show you a bunch of signals which will encourage you to sign in. If you linger and browse through some of the posts, maybe you’ll see some ads. So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.
The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.
But sure. We have all the original content from vine. There is a huge nostalgia factor that gives us a foothold to at least launch something.
We have the media and are trying to build a product like that, so we have been working on that for a while. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we are able to do? There are mock-ups.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do They Want to Do? Why Do They Need to Be There? How Do They Live and Work?
It would most likely be boring. You could probably make a really interesting ethereal horror movie out of just constantly walking around with nothing.
There’s no communications. So the only people talking are people in a corner. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. Everybody is asking, are we ever going to see him? I wonder if I should keep doing work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?
So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. Is it something you would like to be doing at Twitter in three months? Do you believe you are ready to be somewhere else?
Culture is real. I mean, culture seeps through the product. Many of the way the company behaved was due to people caring so much. That can be upsetting in its own way.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employers Speak Out: A Brief Note on How to Prevent Labor Law Suspensions (with Physicists)
People have seen this. The point of this is that we are moving into the phase equivalent of moving fast and break things with no regard for those who are using it.
He is reading the news about the work hours. And he’s been wildly speculating about what kind of labor law lawsuits are going to come out.
So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”
And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. Kevin is his email address. Roose —
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Tuning in on a Conversation with Elon Musk: A Toy Model for the New Twitter TWiP (The Tiny Town of Louder Than You Think)
Davis Land is the producer of “Hard Fork”. Paula Szuchman is the editor of us. The episode was fact checked by one of the reviewers. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.
Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.
Musk had a thought that bubbled up from a fishbowled dorm room while he was saying that small talk feels like it comes from your own mind. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. It’s about not giving more to a platform than people can expect to get back. You need to find a way to use the new twitter without it using you.
A small group of people use the social media site. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) Almost half of users on the site don’t post much more than replies to other people’s posts, and most of those posts are not original. They have access to current events, live sports, and celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”
When the Covid epidemic began, many people were stuck at home and unable to get information from social media. To sit back and observe, is a way of dealing with the complexity and chaos of New TWiP. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. It is always a good idea to watch it during basketball games. Direct those messages to other places if you have to. Save your thoughts for another place.
The Changing Face of Twitter after Musk’s Twitter Decay: A First Step Towards Eliminating the Platform of “Bot Armies”
Since Musk took over the company, he has experienced a range of technical problems. Users have previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.
The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1st, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with.
For every month that the program is in effect, many users can download up to two million quotes from the preceding seven days. Academic institutions can download unlimited amounts for free from the archive. It is useful for understanding online communities and those that spread lies, because it is possible to make intricate maps of how clusters of users relate to each other.
One of the things that Starbird, a researcher for the University of Washington, studies is the nature of online information dynamics during crises.
The FTC fined Musk’s company $150 million for violating an agreement. If a new breach occurred, it would result in millions of dollars in additional fines and a flurry of news coverage to get the followers on Musk’s account back to liking him.
The move will make it more expensive to run many automated accounts, known as bots. There are some bots that are useful and some that are not, for example, ones that highlight every change the New York Times makes to its story headlines or flag an earthquake.
Musk has always wanted to eliminate the platform of “bot armies”. When Twitter first announced last Thursday that it will start charging for API usage without information of pricing or exceptions, bot watchers on the platform bemoaned the imminent demise of creations they loved. Free access will keep coming after Musk said that he would respond to feedback.
No researchers were spared if some bots were spared. The change will also limit what is possible for researchers such as Starbird who have relied on that pipeline, known as an application programming interface or API, to study user behavior and information operations on the platform for years.
After it was announced that it would start charging for the platform, a group of research institutions, advocacy groups and individual researchers from around the world issued an open letter calling on Twitter to maintain access for researchers so that public interest research could continue. In a statement, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said that Twitter should be making data access easier, not harder. As of Wednesday, Twitter did not respond to a request from NPR sent last week for more information about its decision.
Players can use algorithmic recommendation to amplify their message because users’ timelines are shaped by who they follow and also who they recommend.
While the social media landscape has splintered in the past few years, Twitter still serves as a guide post because narratives brewing in smaller platforms could bubble up on Twitter.
In the months since Musk completed his takeover, a small but growing number of services have launched or gained popularity by appealing to users who are not happy with the billionaire’s decisions to slash Twitter’s staff, rethink content moderation policies and reinstate banned accounts.
The main interface of the platform can be bypassed by users using a computer program, which they can use to upload and download data in bulk.
CrowdTangle hasn’t changed: What are the best ways to use Twitter? Investigating Musk’s influence on Twitter, according to NPR
Without access to that wealth of data, researchers will not have the ability to explore narratives that they missed in real time, Starbird says.
By giving users well-documented API access, Twitter’s data has been more transparent than other major social media platforms. Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle, does not provide straightforward ways to download data in real time and in bulk the way Twitter does. The company doesn’t have a replacement in sight and is winding it down. Meta did not answer questions from NPR about CrowdTangle’s future.
TikTok announced last year that it’s testing a research API, and is “planning to expand availability in the US in the coming weeks.” The company told NPR in an email. The company has come under criticism in the past year for allowing disinformation to spread on its platform. Due to its Chinese ownership, it has faced bipartisan scrutiny.
Starbird’s team is throwing ideas around what they can do with Twitter if their current level of access ceases. They intend to focus on Telegram, TikTok and Reddit along with Twitter for the 2024 presidential election while collaborating with teams that monitor other platforms.
“We’ve tended to work within the constraints we’ve had for so long.” Starbird says, and maybe there will be new creative ways to use Twitter data. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of the creativity is going to be better spent on other platforms.”
Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. According to a recent study, US usage of the social media site has declined 9 percent since Musk took over.
He said that it was ridiculous, according to sources with knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Employees showed Musk internal data about engagement with his account. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk told the engineer that he had been fired. The engineer’s name has not been released because of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.
According to a current worker, Musk told employees to keep a record of how many times each of his messages are recommended.
Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The small buttons made them harder to tap, since they were smaller to accommodate the view.
“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
What do we actually do at Slack? A Los Alamos employee’s frustration about the social media company fires engineer putting out fires
One employee said that they have not seen much in the way of cogent strategy. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The headquarters of the social media company in San Francisco is not cheerful about being sued by its landlord. When people pass each other, they are told that the standard greeting is, where are you interviewing and where do you have offers? The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.
The employee said people don’t discuss work things anymore. It’s heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There is no more of that anymore.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns
The Least Fireable Response of an Employee: When Does Elon Really Know What he Does and Where Should he Get His Attention?
When asked about the least fireable response, one employee said to run it through their head.
(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)
The disastrous launch of Twitter Blue resulted in many brands being impersonated by other brands and top advertisers abandoning the platform, according to an employee.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. He should learn to know areas where he does not know and 888-269-5556 888-269-5556s should 888-269-5556s.
At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”
Entire teams have been wiped out due to Musk’s impulsive firing of people, and work is being delegated to other teams that have little understanding of the new work that is assigned to them.
“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. I know for a fact that most of my team is working on hardcore interview prep and will jump at the chance to walk away.
Keeping Twitter away from Twitter: How Artifact and Cohost respond to Musk’s criticism of the App T2 and other social media platforms
There are worries about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.
After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.
T2, which is currently available in beta was launched by Gabor Cselle. The feed has a number of posts with character limits. The key selling point according to Oh is the focus on safety.
Oh said they wanted to create an experience that could allow people to share what they want to share, without fear of abuse and harassment.
There are several new entrants in the markets, one of which is a startup that is backed by one of Musk’s investors. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.
The description of Artifact, “a personalized news feed powered by artificial intelligence”, earned it comparisons to Twitter after being announced last month. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.
The apps are vying for the chance to scratch the itch on users who may not like a news feed that is not on social networking sites.
“Something that we’ve heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall,” said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter. The service launched in the summer of last year. Within 48 hours after Musk completed the takeover, 80,000 users had joined the platform.
“People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.
According to CNN, Rochko recently told them that a platform could not keep going viral forever. The cycle of media news and attention on social media is gone after a while, but behind it there is organic growth which we still have, despite the fact that it has stopped.
How Musk and his employees responded to Twitter’s outage on Monday: “You can’t have it all,” tweeted Musk on the Twitter Outage
Outage tracker site DownDetector showed more than 8,000 Twitter outage reports around noon on Monday. People were talking about the issues on the platform, which led to the slogan, “You can’t have it all.”
Users flooded the social media with their opinions, and often used images that weren’t available on the site to show their points.
A small API change had a lot of consequences, Musk said later in the day, after someone posted a picture of a computer screen showing that the company’s failures were being mentioned on the site. For no good reason, the code stack is brittle. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
In many ways, Monday’s outage represented the culmination of Musk’s leadership at the company so far. In a single-minded effort to cut costs on his $44 billion purchase, he has been slashing the staff and reducing Twitter’s free offerings.
This enabled a single engineer to be staffed on a major project that is linked to several critical systems that both users and employees depend on.
It took all morning for the service to be restored. This is what happens if you fire 90 percent of the company, says another current employee.