Comment by tptacek
4 hours ago
I get that he shredded trust & safety, and that Twitter got way worse afterwards in that regard. But he fired more than half the workforce, and they were not mostly T&S people.
4 hours ago
I get that he shredded trust & safety, and that Twitter got way worse afterwards in that regard. But he fired more than half the workforce, and they were not mostly T&S people.
I dunno, most reports from the time (and a quick Google AI overview just now) mentioned the cuts largely focused on T&S and moderation teams. Even the ML teams he cut reprotedly were working more on safety and integrity issues. Many who worked on "woke" issues were also cut, but the line between T&S and "woke" gets blurry quickly.
To be fair, this could be due to the bias in reporting, as media outlets may have had incentives for over-emphasizing the T&S angle.
I do not deny there was bloat. There was bloat in most tech firms at the time. But I don't think it was 80% bloat. My post was to explain how, even if T&S / moderation seems like a small function, it can require an unexpectedly large headcount -- probably even more for a pure-UGC company like Twitter -- and so could realistically account for the bulk of the cuts.
Come on. Zillions of developers have complained about getting RIF'd. It's not a mystery. I don't like Musk's Twitter. I don't like Musk. But pretending isn't getting us anywhere.