Comment by tptacek
7 hours ago
I have no idea what Musk did or didn't say. I don't pay attention to him; I think he's odious. But he did cut more than half the entire workforce and the service works as well as it ever has, which is pretty damning. I'm not willing tie myself into the pretzel required to explain how antebellum Twitter was well-managed given that.
There's some fraction of that workforce that supported projects intended to make Twitter a viable standalone business, which it probably no longer is. Backoffice / line of business projects intended to support advertisers, that sort of thing. But I don't think you can explain a RIF of Twitter's scale that way.
(I'll try to dig up the Luu post I'm thinking of.)
Many of the workforce he laid off were content moderators -- I've read it was a serious effort with a large number of people doing thankless work. There is now way more anti-Semitic content on X, more racial insults, etc.
Come on. No they weren't.