80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are running, people will be able to post 240 chars of content and some rich media images, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech

Well ok sure, but then I can't imagine that the cuts Musk has done would accurately get rid of the bloat and not just a random selection of 80% of their employees. If you were one of the 20% of people doing actual work, why the hell would you stay if the only future promise is working longer hours and "being more hardcore"? Frankly I'd only agree to that if I was already doing nothing, because zero multiplied by anything is still zero. If you already are doing your job and the company asks you to work even more than before, then get your severance and go.

There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.

Elon said "At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense."

But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.

> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there

This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.

A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users.

If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.

A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.

That's one thing I fully believe Musk on. Twitter is the hottest news in the industry right now. There's no better place to read about it than Twitter itself. Thing of it is... most of the traffic I've seen is rubberneckers. He can only crash his gigayacht so many times before it's no longer a spectacle.

Advertising is basically their whole business, right? Technically I guess most companies can employ fewer people and do less of their core business but that isn’t a great trajectory to be on…

The problem is he's getting rid of the solid workforce and keeping the bloat. No decent engineer would work 80 hours a week in the office over 40 in the home.

For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?

By shifting moderation responsibilities to the individual mods on each subreddit. Reddit employees do very little moderation on their own - mostly reviewing entire subreddits once they get reported enough times - and banning them entirely if they are unsavoury enough. They basically outsourced it to volunteers in exchange for a platform to have your community on(interestingly, Discord works in the exact same way - discord employees only review servers once they get bad enough and ban them, general reports go to server mods and only to them)

Reddit effectively farms out moderation to volunteers. It's a lot like feudalism. Subreddit mods put in the labor of the day to day moderation of the sub in exchange for the ability to wield power over the subreddit. When a subreddit is shirking in it's moderation duties, or otherwise doing something the central power doesn't like the subreddit is deleted.

Reddit has something like over 20,000 unpaid mods that are active daily

It seems you're in a narrow minority with that opinion, though it's closer than I would've guessed. 65% for No Outages by Dec 15, '22.

https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...

Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?

These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.

The people who stay will be those with the least options.

Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.

> are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.

People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.

You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.

Saying something like this just demonstrates that you have extremely limited technical knowledge, and are willing to say anything to defend Musk.

And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.

The projection on here is getting cartoonish.

John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Agreed that the projection is cartoonish, but looking at the actual actions at Twitter speak for themselves.

And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.

Even if this were correct, the specific 20% matters.

I mean, it's possible, but the organisation would need to be extremely disfunctional for that to be the case - that's the level of bloat I'd expect out of a government agency not a private corporation. If you have teams where 8 out of 10 people do literally nothing or pretend, it should be obvious.

That's not what the Pareto Principle says, when reasonably applied to the engineering department [or employees in general] at Twitter.

It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.

On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.

Price's Law works better there.

> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.

> What is Price’s Law?

> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...

https://entreresource.com/prices-law/

They’re getting at two different things: Pareto is getting at whether the work should be done at all; Price is getting at who does the work that gets done. Both are reasonable lenses to consider.

Simplistic answers to difficult and chaotic questions are bogus, heuristics. They may work on average, but twitter is not an average company.

I'd take that bet. 1BTC?

I'm good thanks. Not really into gambling.

Linked elsewhere in this thread - https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...

And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.

I understand why cowards will proclaim both the death of twitter and bitcoin and not back it up with their wallet. However, you are neither thanks for the link.

> Twitter must had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat.

I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.