Comment by asmor
2 years ago
SpaceX has talented people working there despite Elon, not because of him.
They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. They put up with it because they only have so many opportunities to work on space.
Twitter has people dependent on their H-1B and very few true believers that are unfit to serve in their role. Ella Irwin has apparently personally ghost banned ("Hide Reply" but with lying to the user about being hidden) any mention of libsoftiktok - a stochastic terror organization just itching for a lynching of queer people - made anywhere close to TwitterSafety recently.
Right, Twitter is absolutely nothing like SpaceX or Tesla. Twitter's problems aren't engineering issues, they're political and related to moderation. Content moderation is one of the hardest problems current which no company has managed to solve. Especially when you have the user-creator-advertiser triangle. It was clear from the very start Elon has no clue what he was walking into.
My impression were that Twitter’s problems included:
1. Not having that much revenue
2. Being expensive to run
Firing a bunch of people probably helped with #2. But there are definitely engineering problems in there too. For #1, there was the whole verified checks thing but I think that’s not going to bring in anywhere near as much money as ads did. Seems one good thing to do there is not upset advertisers. Currently advertisers seem upset. An alternative would be allowing more advertisers, eg gambling ads are quite lucrative.
The whole censorship/hellsite stuff doesn’t strike me as such an immediate problem – I think Twitter could have done ok for a while with the previous moderation policy changing at the previous rate. Though figuring out better things to do there would probably be necessary in the long term and something a private company might better be able to do, eg figuring out how to focus on the long-term interests of users rather than numbers that shareholders think are important.
But maybe I’m totally wrong and if Elon wasn’t seen to be doing things about censorship the whole thing would fall apart?
> 1. Not having that much revenue
Twitter had $5 billion in revenue in 2021. Its issue was profitability, not revenue.
TikTok seems to have managed it well. Well, except from being chinese-owned.
TikTok is a complete black box, no one has any idea how any of it works, so it's easier to pretend everything is fine if no one knows what's happening. They could be over-moderating and erring on the side of having more false negatives, and no one would know.
Also, I wouldn't really say so, there are plenty of stories about the algorithm serving harmful content to kids. But again since each person has a different FYP, it's hard to tell. Just because you don't fall into a bad rabbit hole doesn't mean some kid out there won't.
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Not sure what makes a big tech company great being totally American controlled. If TikTok is managed well it could be the same with Twitter.
twitter's biggest issue are bots, and that's an engineering issue.
the politics are just noise.
> They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire.
I heard that too. Is it just a rumour or do we know this is true?
And if it's true at SpaceX, is it also true at Tesla?
Regarding your first question, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042340
I see no reason why Tesla would be any different.
That reads like fiction to me.
Someone pseudonymously posting on Tumblr about being an early SpaceX intern is not in anyway a reliable source. The story sounds 100% made up.
At any rate, "managing up" is a normal thing for people in the management hierarchy everywhere.
Tesla is absolutely the same.
I’ve heard about people depending on Twitter for visa sponsorship but I don’t think I’ve seen any firsthand accounts. Is it actually happening? I’ve also heard that people who work for (or were fired from) twitter were deluged with job offers despite it not being a great time for hiring (so my guess is that people on H1-B visas could find sponsorship elsewhere)
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some people are staying for risk-aversion reasons but I feel like most people are there because:
- they actually like Elon or believe in the future of Twitter under different management
- they see it as an opportunity for career growth (you can have proportionally larger impact on the business; fewer senior positions at the company; they will likely hire more people soon, just not at salaries that are effectively inflated by Elon’s purchase)
- they correctly infer that they would be in a worse position if they moved to some other firm. (I think most people thinking this underestimate themselves, however)
It seems like it could be possible for employees to have a big impact on the platform or the business. It also seems like the whole thing could go up in flames. I don’t really know how bad it is to be associated with a site that goes up. I guess not that bad for job prospects for an average employee, especially if they got to learn about putting out fires / many more parts of the system than an average big tech employee. But then experience hacking in minimal fixes to keep mountains of software going perhaps isn’t going to teach you as much as properly understanding and improving fewer systems and making more changes that will have impact over a longer timescale.
It really is criminal how much preferential treatment lott is getting both now and under the previous administration. This alone should be grounds for an investigation into the site
Remind me, who kept posting misinformation about a children's hospital just before it got bomb threats?
And who kept doing it knowing that fact, causing repeats of such bomb threats?
And who posted relentlessly about the drag show in Moore County for more than a month before a bunch of substations got shot up, supposedly to shut them down?
You do the math.