People like to read that stuff.
There's a difference between "wanting" and "liking" something. The reason doomscrolling on social media is a thing is because people want their fix. Whether or not they truly like it is another matter. Most would probably admit they don't, if they really sat down to unpack everything about it.
I'm not defending the clickbait content a lot of outlets engage in but I'm concerned that if the "corporate media" disappeared tomorrow a lot of things would go uninvestigated. I'm also not sure that the number of stories published is a worthwhile metric either. Maybe one truly eye-opening investigative story is worth a hundred boring clickbait articles, I don't really see how you'd quantify it.
If you're genuinely confused by this kind of usage, and actually believe that those absolute terms are used sincerely, then I don't know what to tell you... maybe try to understand culture and language usage better?
But sure, that statement is an improvement because it at least makes clear that if you were to remove the corporate media tomorrow something of important value would be lost. Something the original statement definitely does not convey.
We can even go as far as to say that corporate media likely will not disappear anyway, and if it were to, in 2022, it would just be repackaged in a different format with new corporate or neo-corporate entities in its place.
In conclusion, and irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of “corporate media produces nothing of value” or the more analytically amicable, “only the tiniest fraction of corporate media produces value”, I hereby declare an end to all corporate media and it’s theoretical subsequent reiterations.
But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.
The irony of this is that the reach of corporate media is effectively deadened due to the reason that we’re having this discussion at all: the same outlets bely their own influence by publishing worthless content. In a world without corporate (news) media, there are still other ways to get news out through the wire.
Credibility is a good point, but speaks to a larger discussion on whether credibility in the media is based off of reputation, legacy, acolytes, accolades, etc?
At the end of the day, if the fall of corporate media effectively obliterates peoples will to “speak truth to power”, as the journalists like to say, then society is in pitiful shape and those whose will would disappear along with the Post, the Times and the Tribune lack integrity.
In the scenario we’re discussing (a world without corporate media), people who truly care enough about events, plots and schemes that threaten the moral fiber, dignity, agency and safety of humanity will see to it that they’re uncovered. That is unless, all investigative journalists are frauds who are driven only by glory and gold.
What you’ve described would be “better”, sure. It would be “better” if it rained during a drought than if it didn’t. But what are people going to do in the meanwhile?
Is “corporate” media the only kind of media there is that can present the news either way?
It's a poor contribution to a conversation about the value of media as business enterprise because it's really not clear what the hyperbole is or what the common relatable point is supposed to be. And it might even be subtly nihilistic or privileged ("who's to say I can't believe whatever the hell I want regardless of what them news people say, they're probably just pushing what they want to believe just I like I am anyway").
So "only some fraction of the corporate media's output has intellectual value" would be an improvement. Increased clarity often is.
And it could lead to actually useful understanding, which is that a LOT of things which have high rates of mediocre or even useless output still have value.
I'm pretty sure the original was hyperbole but more accurate statement would be "most of what corporate media produces have zero or negative value and is just facilitator for the clicks"
If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" which, while clearly important and deeply researched, I have never heard of.
That said, most of these journalists are from "corporate media," so that it "produces nothing of intellectual value" is as you say incorrect.
We get it, you are uninformed. It was in major newspapers, was on PBS Frontline, and was adapted for radio, and it won a Pulitzer. You haven't heard of it, that's on you.
Never seen any intellectual value in a BBC drama, comedy, or nature documentary?
The C of BBC does not look like the current practical meaning of corporation for or typical case. Being state-owned change a lot of things.
* E.U. Settles on Russian Oil Price Cap After Fraught Talks
* A phony climate foundation in Germany helped Russia complete Nord Stream 2 after U.S. sanctions threatened to derail it.
* U.S. Employers Add 263,000 Jobs, Showing Strong Demand for Workers
* Why are middle-aged men missing from the labor market?
* Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy
* As Officials Ease Restrictions Amid Protests, China Faces New Pandemic Risks
* Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find
* Kanye West was suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika.
* Cameroon Tries to Become Third African Nation to Advance
* From The Athletic: Follow real-time updates from Serbia vs. Switzerland.
Sure, some of these (e.g. first twitter headline) seem to follow an agenda, but most of these are just plain old news. It is easy to think "all of this is available on Twitter or through other independent journalists", but twitter has the luxury of being able to look at what the papers are reporting on. If you didn't have the likes CNN, NYT and the BBC, you wouldn't have reporters at white house press conferences, people reporting from Ukraine, nor any sort of real curation of the news.
Are there blind spots? Of course. Twitter is way better in some niche areas. Do the news outlets show biases? Yes, of course. But without the big news outlets, twitter wouldn't have as much to go off of. I like to think of it the other way around... imagine that corporate media didn't exist. You'd have thousands of independent journalists looking into different things with no curation. Eventually, some of them would realize that to be effective, they need to form groups, since some areas are too big for one person to cover. Eventually, small groups that people followed would grow larger as they try to report on more and more things. Eventually, they'd collectivize and form larger "corporations". You'd be back to square one.
And I'm just talking about plain old news. All of this is leaving aside the big and costly investigative pieces that some of the larger outlets are able to put together. Go and read anything at https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206 and tell me if anyone but "corporate media" would be able to do anything even close to these.
BuzzFeed News Has Won Its First Pulitzer Prize
BuzzFeed News won for its innovative series exposing China’s mass detention of Muslims and was named a finalist for its colossal FinCEN Files investigation into the global banking industry.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/pulitzer-priz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News#Awards_and_recog...
Though make sure that you differentiate BuzzFeed News from BuzzFeed... the later is the way that makes money that is able to support news site without needing subscriptions and paywalls.
Elon Musk, previously adored by many for futurist technology advocacy and largely forgiven for quirky-billionaire-behavior is now on the "bad guy list". This is "public opinion", from my perspective. It is now common to hear people saying: "He didn't really build that" "His family had money" "His family had a mine" "He's a fascist" "He's a racist because of where/when he was born"
Any and every attempt to report on the fallout from Musk buying twitter will command the headlines. Doesn't matter if it's the same strategy any other takeover management would employ. That's irrelevant. Musk? Bad Guy.
So: "Elon Bad. Twitter suffer. Here's an example..."
To be fair, that's been going on at least 2-3 years. Way before he got involved with Twitter.
Presumably any private equity firm would also have came to a conclusion of reducing headcount.
They wouldn't have done so in a single week based on ridiculous analysis. And wouldn't have done so in a way to destroy the morale of remaining workforce.
>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday
Just when? Just three??
I don't think any of it had to do with people having "nothing better to do on their own projects".
I don't know about you, but if my new boss, the one that threatened to fire 3/4ths of the staff, told me to do something, it doesn't matter what I was working on before, my sole new project would be what the boss wanted.
>Some of us had worked through the weekend trying to help out a colleague who’d been given an insanely tight deadline
Note: the deadline was given to "a colleague", not to "our team". Same here:
>My colleague, whom I liked a lot, was never going to get it done in time without help, so we all pitched in.
Also note that he seems to never have worked on such a schedule before:
>I actually quite enjoyed it.
April 25th, Twitter Locks Down Product Changes After Agreeing to Musk Bid
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/twitter-l... --- https://archive.ph/CK1X1
> For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accepted a $54.20-a-share bid from Musk after a whirlwind courtship that began with the Tesla Inc. magnate disclosing a 9% stake in Twitter earlier this month.
> Product changes will require approval from a vice president, the people said. Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people.
April 26, Twitter is protecting its source code from disgruntled employees, reports say https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/26/twitter-lock-source-code-e...
---
For several months, nothing that was not business critical was released (or done). If you were on something that wasn't business critical, you were likely waiting for a fire to fight, working on the "ok, maybe after this all blows over I can deploy this - but not until then."
In either case, not having something to do that was more pressing than helping out a person would not be surprising.
In the context you have provided - yes. But in the context of my professional experience it is rather surprising. Note that the author has not mentioned he was uncomfortable sitting there doing nothing. What he mentioned was:
>we all pitched in. I actually quite enjoyed it.
That looks like that was the first time for him ever. Also quite surprising - for me and my experience.
PS. Also:
>As soon as Musk became owner, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday
Sweet Jesus. Just "as soon"? Just three??
Any private equity firm would probably not have come to the recommendation of purchasing a firm that was, in ongoing terms, narrowly profitable in a transaction that would saddle the firm with about a third of its annual pre-acquisition revenue, several times its annual profit, and a sizable share of its project post-acquisition reserves in annual debt service costs, even if the particular buyer wasn’t one where the mere prospect of the purchase would disrupt revenue.
As much as they can be very much be criticized, there is a sense in which criticizing Musk’s post-acquisition actions at Twitter is akin to criticizing actions of the Titanic’s officers and crew after the encounter with the iceberg.
I guess the real question is, why should anyone expect Elon to have exemption from the hate game that everyone else is apart of?
This is almost a truism. When someone reaches an extreme position, they can never be ordinary again and they will be judged by absolute terms.
Do you have any reference points or reasons why you believe this is normal contrary to my own professional experience?
It's actually a requirement for many compliance certifications in the US - previously employed staff are not allowed access to your systems.
If you're in an office - you can wait until you grab the employee and put them in a conference room to fire them before cutting access (as long as security is there to escort them out afterwards). When everyone is remote - that is not an option.
ex: item number 1 for SOC 2 compliance is
----
Access controls
—logical and physical restrictions on assets to prevent access by unauthorized personnel.
----
When an employee is terminated - they are unauthorized personnel.
It's funny that they would fire people in this way, then turn around and ask the remaining folks to sign up for "working long (uncompensated) hours at high intensity".
They are trying to have it both ways.
I've never seen that attitude last beyond the initial 50 or so employees at a startup, and it sure as fuck doesn't last past the "we're installing monitoring software on all your machines" stage.
Work is what you do to get paid - it's not your family. It's not your friend. Don't treat it like it is.
That doesn't mean don't take it seriously, or respect it - just understand that work is your family like a hooker is your girlfriend - it's only true until the money runs out.
To me, the way y'all present it is not the norm. It's working for a company that clearly does not trust its employees and treats them poorly. If you find yourself working for those kind of places frequently then please realize that it is not the norm and you should not try and normalize it.
You keep coming back to this - but even in companies where they do trust the employees - legal compliance is not a joke. If you're doing anything at all with customers who are in any of the following businesses...
Healthcare
Banking
Gov
Finance
Law practice
etc...
Then you turn off access when you fire an employee. Period. You can like them all you want, in which case you might go grab drinks with them afterwards - but you don't fuck around with access to your systems, because you lose your compliance certifications, or you get breached, and you lose a bunch of fucking money, you lose your enterprise contracts, and you yourself likely get fired.
This is not standard procedure for a voluntary exit at most companies. The employee puts in their two weeks, works the time, and exits. The assumption is good faith on both ends, because the employee has chosen to leave.
It absolutely is the standard procedure for GETTING FIRED. The other standard part of getting fired is that the company has already decided they no longer need your skills or expertise (excluding twitter's situation, where they decided poorly - according to the news).
If you're laying off 100 people - the odds that any one of them might do something silly is very low. But that chance * 100 is usually considered an unacceptable risk from a security standpoint. Multiply it by several thousand, and it's absolutely not ok to leave the keys to the kingdom with that many fired employees.
All it takes is one drunk employee holding a grudge and you get a really nasty mess on your hands. Not to mention legal hot water.
But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big company that ships a small handful of products, of which only Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Web really seems to matter. As long as they don't fire their sysops and iOS developers, most Twitter users would probably never notice a difference.
…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/28/twitter-loses...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/30/tech/twitter-eu-complianc...
They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.
Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.
It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.
None of those things are going to have any impact on the eventual outcome here.
I was pretty clear about the very specific problems they are facing and how any one of them individually is potentially fatal for them. Without solutions to those problems the end result is going to be the same it’s just the timeline that’s in question.
However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who took PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe
Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.
It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).
Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.
[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states
But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)
> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though
Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.
Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.
So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.
But a bunch of stuff did break. Famously 2FA stopped working, there has been an explosion of spam, and other widely reported issues- which are only the ones we know about - there could very well be some truely abhorrent stuff going under the hood to keep the wheels from falling off.
The idea that a week or two of something other than total violent collapse being a measure of how well you're handling staffing has got the smell of management track thinking all over it.
We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyond repair, but the core platform seems intact.
From article: "As soon as Musk actually took over, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday." I wonder why...
And hell, hiring that many people at once is a lot of work to whoever left...
That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.
You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.
Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.
Apart from Twitter's ability to generate revenue.
And him firing a bunch of people wasn't why companies stopped paying him (why would they care?), it was every other thing he did with the platform.
> That was broken when he bought it.
You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.
This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.
The only system that does not require ongoing maintenance is one that no one uses.
Yet. That we know about. As the system trends towards entropy.
A large company is more than their website. Legal teams, regulatory compliance, infosec, etc. Apparently most of that is gone.
This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.
it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.
Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets
Yes, Twitter doesn't build physical things or operate any store fronts... but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of complexity that is within the company and the way that it maintains its funding.
This is a terrible example and you know it. Walmart has physical stores everywhere.
Besides, my comment was about Walmart, which has over 10,000 stores... So of course they have more employees than Twitter by a huge margin.
So let's imagine you run Twitter and you're operating in every western country on the planet. Now, all those countries have different laws and regulations. Are you, the genius CEO/coder/whatever going to be the one who sits down with regulators and discuss the nuance of their laws? Or are lawyers one of those salespeople/moderators?
The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.
No, it's because they haven't done anything innovative in a decade and their product is much simpler than a ton of tech companies with half the staff... Their stock price was super depressed and they were losing what, $4 million per day?
It's super obvious for anyone remotely financially literate that they were way overstaffed. Any buyer would have laid off at least half the staff...
Even Jack Dorsey admitted it: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/jack-dorsey-speaks-twitter...
Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cut staff willy-nilly, there goes a lot of revenue.
"but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it"
Everyone knows it because it's what everyone on the right has been stating without evidence for weeks. You've heard it so much it's become like an obvious fact even though you can't point to any hard evidence. I say this because you make statements like that. As if you are saying "The capital of France is Paris".
You also said
"Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter."
How do you know how many employees it takes? How do you know 1500 is all they need? You just keep making statements without any backing them up nor do I think you can unless you're C level at Twitter
Also any company might be losing money with staff being the main reason but still need that level of staff.
Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees
> multiple manned missions a year to the ISS
Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid
But, that's not what happened or I implied. Read for yourself -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
A great example - Boeing had more money, more people and the same external support and they STILL haven't launched a vehicle yet. SpaceX has beat them by almost 4 years and counting. You'd think with '100k people' they could do it by now right?
Again, OP didn't do that. In the article, Elon Musk's quote didn't reference "all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that [SpaceX] is built on."
What musk is doing is, well, clown fiesta, but it's easy to look at twitter finances and see someone isn't making company's money
Elon? Is that you?
I still don't really understand what there is worth talking about here. Twitter is notoriously overstaffed, and any new management would start by cutting non-essential engineer positions.