All the best people think Twitter is dead.
They keep saying so on Twitter. NPR had a podcast on Twitter being dead, and at the end asked listeners to follow them on…Twitter.
Death is in the air on Twitter. https://t.co/ABljA9Lk7A
— CNN (@CNN) November 18, 2022
I certainly hope Twitter isn’t dying; I use it all the time to get story ideas. Reacting to people being stupid on Twitter and finding MSM articles to make fun of or explain is my business model. Twitter is vital to me, if not exactly a major contribution to rational discourse.
I think of Twitter as a sewer of hate with some diamonds at the bottom. You have to wade through a lot of crap to find the diamonds. But they are there.
So when I woke up (way, way too early Ed Morrissey!) this morning I was greeted with a flood of Tweets that were epitaphs for the platform. #Twitterisdead and similar hashtags were trending, and the best commentators in the world were lamenting the loss of the world’s digital town square. Some were even suggesting the nationalization of this vital resource.
Time to nationalize Twitter?
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 18, 2022
This all started because some Twitter employees who were revolting–in both senses of the word–were screaming that without them Twitter would collapse. Yeah. Sure. John wrote a piece yesterday about this. You should read it.
🚨 Twitter could break as soon as tonight.
According to an inside source, the internal version of the Twitter app used by employees is already slowing down. pic.twitter.com/dIp2EODyQV
— Pop Base (@PopBase) November 18, 2022
Elon Musk was laughing about it. Cruel man.
The other day he was accused of wanting to starve employees to death because lunch would no longer be free for employees, so he is getting used to being hated. I am not kidding, by the way. He was literally accused of starving employees because he refused to pay up to $400/serving lunches for employees.
Elon Musk mocks claim he's starving Twitter employees for ending free lunches: ‘Is this a parody?’ https://t.co/9oeXJbLKjp
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 14, 2022
There is talk that Twitter is down 90% of its employees since Musk took it over. The latest exodus was triggered by Musk not only demanding employees actually show up to work (revolt!), but that when they were there they be hardcore doing the job. This was excessively cruel.
Me refreshing every 5 mins to see if Twitter is still there or not#Twittershutdown #byebyetwitter pic.twitter.com/QuTAgN8CDP
— iatrogenic 🇮🇳🕉️⚕️🩺🏏👨🏻⚕️🦠🛕💊💉 (@Paramomycin) November 18, 2022
Elon Musk seems to be one of the few people taking Twitter’s travails in stride. He seems utterly unconcerned that the platform may collapse, and he has $54 billion riding on its sticking around. Almost as much skin in the game as I do, given that my meagre salary depends upon my churning out 6 articles a day, mostly provided by trolling Twitter. Elon’s responses are pitch perfect:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
Perhaps Elon knows something about what is going on at the company that others don’t?
First, it is unlikely that they are really down 90% in employees since he took over–that is a rumor, not an established fact. Rumors spread like wildfire on Twitter, after all. That is part of its charm. And rumors are what the MSM relies on to keep their business going, so they too need Twitter to flourish.
Second, most Twitter employees were likely hangers-on. Employable only when times were flush, and they are not now. Every tech platform is dumping employees like toxic waste being transported in mob-run waste disposal trucks. In Silicon Valley you can find tech employees strewn along roadsides after they boarded the free buses that used to take them back and forth to work and home. Now they are rotting by the side of the road. Metaphorically, of course.
One of the founders of YouTube pointed out something I didn’t know, but is highly relevant:
I don't know who needs to hear this but Craigslist has being running for the last 20+ years with a team of ~50 people.
— Chad Hurley (@Chad_Hurley) November 18, 2022
Lastly, Elon is likely following a business strategy, as Megan McArdle (read her!) pointed out.
One possibility is that there is a method to Musk's madness: he thinks Twitter's corporate culture is so broken that the company cannot be reformed with its current employee base. Turnaround CEOs sometimes want most of the employees to quit so they can rebuild anew.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) November 18, 2022
That is exactly what Oliver Campbell thinks is going on: it is a management strategy that often happens after a takeover, and one that Elon Musk uses at all his companies constantly. His explanation makes a lot of sense.
First, the "Whaling":
It's a common refrain that you've probably heard at some point or another "10% of people do 90% of the work." That's what that tight 2 week deadline for Twitter Blue was for; he was perfectly aware that it was an unrealistic time frame. It was a test.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) November 18, 2022
Hence, Elon was looking for the whales at the company. The heavy hitting, actually producing and hard people who have been there for a while. When the whales don't have to carry dead weight, they perform like the equivalent of 10 people.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) November 18, 2022
So by culling unproductive staff, he actually untied the hands of the PRODUCTIVE staff. Fewer obstacles to getting in the way of getting things done. It also revealed to him who was there to make Twitter a better product, versus who was there to be 'activists'.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) November 18, 2022
Because the productive people actually know WHAT THEY NEED to get things done. Don't be surprised if the people that are left get to be part of the interviewing process for the new people. They'll be looking for efficiency and people who don't make THEIR jobs more difficult.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) November 18, 2022
This is what he was talking about with 'Twitter 2.0.' It's likely not a 'new twitter.' Not for us. It's a new Twitter INTERNALLY. How things get done, how things get rolled out, rebuilding the company with productive and more efficient people.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) November 18, 2022
So, from the outside, this looks like a giant cluster.
But it what's going to surprise you is that a great number of businesses are run exactly like this.
There's a reason layoffs happens every single year across the world. Whaling and culling. Elon is just being VERY VOCAL.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) November 18, 2022
None of us speculating on Twitter about Twitter knows diddly squat about what will happen. Twitter will not die, but perhaps there will be hiccups. There were before Musk was in charge. There are even websites that will tell you whether Twitter (or other tech services) go down, because they sometimes do. One of the big platforms (Amazon Web Services? I forget) had a hiccup a while back and a huge chunk of the Internet crashed. It happens.
I panicked a couple of months ago–well before Twitter was under Musk–because the service went down for several hours. How would I know what the Narrative™ was without Twitter to insert it into the hive mind? It came back and I could pretend to think again.
Twitter’s real problems are not related to employee loss. They stem from never having a decent revenue stream. That has been a problem since Twitter was born. Musk apparently has a plan to fix that, but even he fails sometimes. He could lose his shirt, but it won’t be because Twitter dies from engineering neglect.
After all, we have learned from all the best people that coal miners should learn to code, and I assume that they and the other fossil fuel workers who lost their jobs due to Biden’s policies have done so. A former coal miner who learned to code after Biden told him to would probably be a hard worker and good employee for Musk, never whinging about having to show up.
FLASHBACK to 2019 when Joe Biden told coal miners to learn to code.
“Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” pic.twitter.com/kAkMlr4ICN
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 7, 2022
There are a lot of hideously stupid takes on Twitter right now. A commentator at The Hill spewed crap about a joke as if it were serious. Two comedic types played a prank on the breathless reporters covering Twitterpocalypse, pretending to be fired Twitter employees. Employees Ligma and Johnson, names that together refer to a sex act. Elon thought it was so funny he found them and invited them to Twitter as fake rehired employees. She bought the prank–twice:
.@briebriejoy at @HillTVLive doesn't think Ligma and Johnson were happy to be brought back to @Twitter.
cc: @0interestrates, @growing_daniel https://t.co/dUK1RvGGU5 pic.twitter.com/Jh6yq28H0B
— 🌽 Grateful Potato Of Reason 🦃 (@PapaDeRazon) November 17, 2022
Almost everybody screaming about how Musk is killing Twitter is a dunce talking out of their nether regions. Musk may save Twitter, or he may have to cut his losses and hand it over to somebody else who can figure out how to make money with it. But he is not flailing. He is clearly enjoying himself. And now even the Babylon Bee is back on Twitter, so God is good.
I would say “calm down,” but never in the history of saying “calm down” has anybody calmed down because of it.
So sit back, enjoy the ride, and laugh at the idiots.
Twitter's workforce also grew 50% between 2020 and 2022, during which time it also went from being profitable to losing money despite generating more revenue. Bottom line is that all else aside, Twitter's workforce was bloated and its human resources were badly managed.
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) November 18, 2022
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