tw352852

That is the same internal goal that SoundCloud has. Play counts is just what users want to see. All of SoundCloud's internal optimization is around listening time.

This seems likely to me. Apparently the office staff and HR teams are down to 1 person each. Previously it was about 10-15 people.

The problem with groups was it was used by 0.5% of users, and most of the playback was actually fake spam plays. The soundcloud spammers had all the gaming figured out on that part of the system and it was basically worthless.

I know, because I worked on getting it shutdown. Not because I disliked the idea myself, but with no developers working on fixing it, the feature needed to be removed in order to cleanup the database spam and a huge chunk of a legacy code base.

We wanted to replace it, but nobody could convince management to fund it with headcount. But that's the story of SoundCloud, fantastic levels of miss-management.

It was never more than 100 at a time tho.

With these layoffs, I'm guessing it's hovering around 60

I did the back of the napkin math, and saw this coming a year ago. The numbers just didn't work out.

When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.

I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.