When trying to upgrade to verified org: "An unexpected error occurred"
When trying to change my display name: "An unexpected error occurred"
When trying to run an ad: "Awaiting verification" for a week
Contacting support through messages: No response
Finally finding a way to submit a ticket: 3 day response time with a standard response that didn't resolve the issue.
Responded to that ticket and haven't gotten a response in days.
I don't think they're operating at the same level as they used to :)
Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.
You can see this a lot with companies bought by Private Equity firms. They slash costs and save a lot of short-term costs, and all looks good, but the company is now on a path to death.
> the company is now on a path to death
Probably, but it's going to be a very long tail. Forums do not cost that much to run.
Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.
…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.
It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.
My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.
This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).
Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?
It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.
1. The ones remaining are practically working 24x7 every day for essentially the same pay, with the promise of more.
2. You keep falling behind on all the things you need to do to keep things alive and compliant. This eventually comes back in the form of outages or worse, FTC fines.
3. There is very little room for forward looking work, which means you are sacrificing opportunities for growth. E.g.
> 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today
These were two very different numbers. The numbers in 2015 were DAUs and the numbers today are mDAU. mDAU are in layman terms users that can be monetized. This number was ~180M in 2018, so the growth was there. Part of the reason why the ad revenue was growing for Twitter during that phase.
4. Safety and Trust on the platform drops quite a bit when you are understaffed. Regardless of your political beliefs or whether you're team Elon, when there are 10 people banning CP instead of 100, there is no way you could argue objectively that the platform stays the same.
There's plenty of other problems, but you would not know they exist unless you're one of the people left after the figurative massacre.
80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
They also changed their content rules to allow drastically more content, which reduces the total amount of work to be done. You could argue that this is a good thing because the moderation was useless and censoring before, but the moderation also made it a friendlier place for major advertisers who have since pulled out—so changing the moderation resulted in a business model change. That's naturally going to reduce headcount.
Without question though, despite the appearance of velocity in shipping features post-layoffs, the features were either small changes or if they were big, already partially deployed as experiments to small groups of users.
Aside from Grok, Musk's Twitter hasn't shipped anything new except and expanded monetization system (again, partially implemented when he took over anyway).
Your definition of "working" needs work. Nothing you said contradicts the parent.
Whereas there used to be interesting exchanges and threads before, algorithm now promotes similar nonsensical short responses again and again. The stuff on top is just not interesting anymore.
I'm also getting a lot of garden variety "West/Christianity vs East/Islam" type race baiters and stupid 9gag type memes despite actively trying to indicate to the algorithm that I'm not interested. I think they've skewed it towards controversy to increase engagement but it's just boring.
They have a ton of outages, the app is constantly buggy, the ad network is ridiculous, the moderation is nonexistent. I faced a bug that new tweets wouldn't load _for weeks_. If it was any other company, we would be saying they are done, but since it is Elon at the helm, some people pretend that Twitter still works.
The parent reply has an important point: a good % of headcount reductions tend to affect r&d and the type of projects where cutting investment doesn’t have a negative short or even medium term effect on the company. Sometimes it can even be positive for operations (e.g. infra teams have to support less product teams). This is mostly why it’s very uncommon to see headcount reductions lead to instability, etc.
Long term effects (e.g. stagnation, no innovation..) may manifest, but are harder to see clearly in advance, and when they do happen the connection to those layoffs from N years ago is not obvious/even remembered
The main app is generally functional, but it's easy to see the deterioration of the smaller subsystems that large platforms like that need for a good user experience. For instance, I have an account that I am unable to log into because their password recovery/change feature doesn't seem send me anything when I click it. I'm sure frequent users have a litany of little things they've noticed that are flaky or outright broken, even if they can still send and read tweets.
Twitter is not able to attract ads, because they don't communicate with companies properly and are chaotic.
A premium (as in requires money), also-ran AI with a juvenile "sense of humor" and payments? These are significant?
Until it is not. I am regularly interviewing people with remarkable low skills who want salary of a full-fledged software engineers, and they even had that salary before. Lots of companies overhired low-quality workforce in the last five years, maybe it's time to fix that.
It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future layoff fears.
The idea that companies like Twitter/X just removed a lot of employees and then operated exactly the same as before is a myth being propagated online right now, but companies must change their operations as part of layoffs. It's usually not obvious from the outside because the core product always gets attention, but side initiatives, internal tooling, new feature concepts, and even less-visible things (think bot/spam detection on X) lose attention that they may have needed.
But no, the idea that companies are making 10% of their workforce disappear at no cost to the business is just fantasy. The only time I saw this happen was when a company hired so fast that they didn't have work for some people to do, but that mistake was quickly recognized.