The great Twitter cleaning has begun

[Angrybk]

10 minutes ago, Skywalkre said:

This notion of folks be employed and barely working isn't something that's solely found in the tech industry.  I've mentioned before that I work a blue collar job in a warehouse for a company that pays well above what our competition does (before the local excesses in inflation and cost of living that translated to a very comfortable life here in the Valley).

The reality is a majority of my co-'workers' spend over half their day standing around talking.  Many are able to pick up hours to do nothing.  With the recent realities of highest-inflation-in-the-country coupled to largest-increase-in-cost-of-living that's pissed off those of us who actually do work.  A few managers have been asked why all this wasted payroll isn't cut, the money spent on it split between the company and the rest of us, and we're just met with shoulder shrugs.  (I've mentioned it before, too, that most of these co-'workers' are die-hard Rs who if you were to ask them think they're working their asses off every day).

This is just the reality of business everywhere.  This is also a big reason I just chuckle when so many of you defend businesses as these holy institutions who are doing everything right and proper and how dare we question them.  So many, everywhere, are being run poorly, inefficiently, and greedily (the latter happening at my company as well as we're one of those places who have upped prices far more than inflation can justify but writing it off to customers as due solely to inflation).

That’s why I would have a hard time going back to an office, because I work pretty weird — I tend to type like a lunatic for 20 minutes then get bored and walk the dog for a while, come back eventually, etc. I just couldn’t do butts-in-seats work anymore. 
My company is 100 percent “you have a workload equivalent to a challenging but not insane full time job, if you don’t do it or your work sucks we fire you, otherwise you’re a grownup and we don’t really how you do it.”

[Skywalkre]

7 minutes ago, Angrybk said:

I think well-moderated Reddit subforums can be pretty good. 

Some of those are great (though I feel bad for the mods who are effectively doing FT work for free).

I'm curious what you were referencing when you said twitter can be good for some stuff.

What I see it used for is... ugh... it doesn't work.  Folks remember that analysis by the guy at the start of the Ukraine war on Russian tires?  That was an amazing read... and twiter sucks for long-form discussions like that.  Was painful to read that.

At the other end if you can fit anything meaningful into a twitter post than you obviously don't have room for more context or supporting commentary.

All that leaves is statements like "AZDOT wants drivers to know Loop 202 Eastbound is closed this weekend".  I don't have twitter and get those announcements from a local news station app.  Are those the type of local government announcements you were referencing?

[Angrybk]

1 minute ago, Skywalkre said:

Some of those are great (though I feel bad for the mods who are effectively doing FT work for free).

I'm curious what you were referencing when you said twitter can be good for some stuff.

What I see it used for is... ugh... it doesn't work.  Folks remember that analysis by the guy at the start of the Ukraine war on Russian tires?  That was an amazing read... and twiter sucks for long-form discussions like that.  Was painful to read that.

At the other end if you can fit anything meaningful into a twitter post than you obviously don't have room for more context or supporting commentary.

All that leaves is statements like "AZDOT wants drivers to know Loop 202 Eastbound is closed this weekend".  I don't have twitter and get those announcements from a local news station app.  Are those the type of local government announcements you were referencing?

Yeah that’s pretty much what I was referencing (I should see if my local news does that!) I mean, it’s still a cheap and effective way to get info across. 

[Skywalkre]

7 minutes ago, Angrybk said:

My company is 100 percent “you have a workload equivalent to a challenging but not insane full time job, if you don’t do it or your work sucks we fire you, otherwise you’re a grownup and we don’t really how you do it.”

I would kill for a job like that.  You all hiring?  😄

The sad thing is so many places aren't like that and there's no good explanation for it.

At my job several of us who actually do work have basically had enough.  We regularly given an earful to management about how they do nothing and actively defend keeping employees on who do nothing or actually hurt the productivity of our location.  Apparently our management is so fucked up in the head that they'd rather meet some metric showing corporate how many bodies we have working than show them we can do more with less.  How bloody ridiculous is that?!

[Angrybk]

4 minutes ago, Skywalkre said:

I would kill for a job like that.  You all hiring?  😄

The sad thing is so many places aren't like that and there's no good explanation for it.

At my job several of us who actually do work have basically had enough.  We regularly given an earful to management about how they do nothing and actively defend keeping employees on who do nothing or actually hurt the productivity of our location.  Apparently our management is so fucked up in the head that they'd rather meet some metric showing corporate how many bodies we have working than show them we can do more with less.  How bloody ridiculous is that?!

Middle management is a curse everywhere, for the metrics-generation reasons you mentioned. Executives love metrics and freak out at the thought of not being able to granularly control stuff. 
“You’re a big boy and we will leave you alone, just do the job” isn’t like a new idea, though, and it helps a lot if the employees actually like their work and see it as a privilege to be there. There’s that great quote in the Skunk Works book where the guy is talking about his engineers - something along thoje lines of “we honestly don’t care if you’re doing your work at midnight while wearing a prom dress.” And he was a grizzled 1960s Lockheed manager!

[rmgill]

52 minutes ago, Skywalkre said:

You probably have better access to folks/sites/etc. to judge how his handling of twitter is going.  Reddit, for example, is losing their shit over how he's handling it and portending twitter tanking in the near future (if all the advertisers leave that's a certainty).  What are your thoughts?  What are you hearing?

What is Twitter's Pre-Musk Income to Debt Ratio? 

[17thfabn]

59 minutes ago, Skywalkre said:

Frankly I couldn't care less.  I've never understood what twitter gives us that couldn't be done better elsewhere or that's even necessary in the first place.

I've never been a twitter follower of anything or any one.

I do find it interesting that it seems like twitter had a big effect on what news stories were covered. My impression was there were a lot of fake accounts that were used to make it look like there was more interest in an issue than there really was.

Musk is obviously a very smart guy. But I question the wisdom of buying something like twitter where if he angers the wrong people he loses his revenue streams, which is the point of any business.

I think it was Warren Buffet who said " don't buy anything you don't understand". Meaning if a business's model didn't make sense to you don't buy the stock, or in Musk's case the company.

Musk is seeing a value there that I don't. There is a reason he has a gazillion $$$! 

[Angrybk]

28 minutes ago, rmgill said:

What is Twitter's Pre-Musk Income to Debt Ratio? 

Very bad! It was a money losing company (don’t have the numbers handy) that had achieved disproportionate cultural prominence. I don’t think Musk has any deep thoughts on how to fix it and that’s why he tried to back out of buying it. 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Angrybk

[Angrybk]

4 minutes ago, 17thfabn said:

I've never been a twitter follower of anything or any one.

I do find it interesting that it seems like twitter had a big effect on what news stories were covered. My impression was there were a lot of fake accounts that were used to make it look like there was more interest in an issue than there really was.

Musk is obviously a very smart guy. But I question the wisdom of buying something like twitter where if he angers the wrong people he loses his revenue streams, which is the point of any business.

I think it was Warren Buffet who said " don't buy anything you don't understand". Meaning if a business's model didn't make sense to you don't buy the stock, or in Musk's case the company.

Musk is seeing a value there that I don't. There is a reason he has a gazillion $$$! 

I think Twitter’s outsized prominence in the news is because most journalists are Twitter obsessives and it’s easy for them to report on things that are happening “around” them and easy to think that this reflects what’s really important. Sort of like the “Nyc disease” where the latest fashion trend in Brooklyn is more newsworthy than a factory closure in Missouri, because all the journalists live in NYC (although that’s also because responsible local news in the US has taken a giant nosedive over the past 30 years because economics, I cud go on and on). 

[Skywalkre]

16 minutes ago, 17thfabn said:

My impression was there were a lot of fake accounts that were used to make it look like there was more interest in an issue than there really was.

There's no doubt this is how it used to be.  About ten years ago a long disappeared FB friend of mine posted about her job.  She lived down in Tucson and her company had employees like her that ran hundreds, probably thousands, of fake twitter accounts.  A business paid her company to have employees like her generate 'buzz' on a buyer's twitter (and other social media pages).  Around the same time I remember coming across an article highlighting that something like just 10% of twitter accounts were real.

Now... it's possible the buzz created from fake accounts like that friend ran eventually created this illusion of twitter being real and eventually that 10% figure rose much higher... but there's no denying that early on twitter absolutely was a sham.

[Angrybk]

14 minutes ago, Skywalkre said:

There's no doubt this is how it used to be.  About ten years ago a long disappeared FB friend of mine posted about her job.  She lived down in Tucson and her company had employees like her that ran hundreds, probably thousands, of fake twitter accounts.  A business paid her company to have employees like her generate 'buzz' on a buyer's twitter (and other social media pages).  Around the same time I remember coming across an article highlighting that something like just 10% of twitter accounts were real.

Now... it's possible the buzz created from fake accounts like that friend ran eventually created this illusion of twitter being real and eventually that 10% figure rose much higher... but there's no denying that early on twitter absolutely was a sham.

Dammit, and I was always pro-Tucson during the Phoenix-vs-Tucson wars!

[Angrybk]

BTW the lawsuit re the layoffs seems pretty solid, the California WARN act is pretty explicit. Musk will probably settle. https://nypost.com/2022/11/04/twitter-sued-over-elon-musks-plan-for-mass-layoffs/

Again I don't have any great love for Twitter and it's not like most of the laid-off employees will end up begging in the street, so I'm pretty much "shrug, rich people do bizarre shit that we could never get away with, News at 11." 

As far as social media goes, I've basically muted all my Facebook contacts (especially the ones who are constantly posting "maybe I'm hungry and should get a pizza!" type messages). I like seeing pictures of my old friends' kids, I'm on some great groups that are well moderated and don't have any assholes ("weird airplanes of WW2." "vintage bicycles," "Town and County class cruisers") and I really enjoy them. I avoid any kind of political discussion on anything nowadays.

Edited November 9, 2022 by Angrybk

[DB]

I wonder how many of the laid-off twitter employees are on the limited immigration work visa (is it H1B?) The one that gives them a couple of months to find a new job, or it's on the plane out. I seem to recall it applied to at least one of the seniors.

[Stuart Galbraith]

17 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

Some of those are great (though I feel bad for the mods who are effectively doing FT work for free).

I'm curious what you were referencing when you said twitter can be good for some stuff.

What I see it used for is... ugh... it doesn't work.  Folks remember that analysis by the guy at the start of the Ukraine war on Russian tires?  That was an amazing read... and twiter sucks for long-form discussions like that.  Was painful to read that.

At the other end if you can fit anything meaningful into a twitter post than you obviously don't have room for more context or supporting commentary.

All that leaves is statements like "AZDOT wants drivers to know Loop 202 Eastbound is closed this weekend".  I don't have twitter and get those announcements from a local news station app.  Are those the type of local government announcements you were referencing?

As ive said before, it really depends on who you have marked. Everything by Telenko is really interesting, and usually pretty insightful. But ive also had historians marked, such as Nate Jones, so anything pops up about Able Archer I get it. In the last week I received two interesting documents via Twitter, one that was about SIGINT used during KAL 007 (I think I referenced it here earlier). And the other was an web article on the use of 3 SIGINT Spy Satellites  (two with the improbable names FARRAH and RAQUEL after the stars Farrah Fawcett and Raquel Welch) and their use in the Falklands war trying to assist the British in sinking an Aircraft Carrier. Which also indirectly told me a lot  about their usage during the cold war, particularly spying on the coms of SAM2 batteries. Which again impacted on the earlier document about KAL 007, some of which was redacted.

Now I grant you search engine would give you some of that. But twitter is always trawling for stuff you are interested in, you dont have to go look for it every day. I can accept that this has negatives as far as news is concerned. As far as history, particularly 20th Century History, its absolutely fantastic. One guy even posted up about the identification of the Emperor Hadiran as the builder of the eponymous wall, but related that he did it though the improbable effort of adding a 200 page addendum to his history of Yorkshire about it. Wacky, but absolutely fascinating. I would never have found it, nor gone looking, for something like that with a search engine.

Yes, for news, 90 percent on twitter is complete trash. I would argue that disguises the truth that of the 10 percent thats left, maybe 2 percent  of it is absolute gold. But nobody will give them any credit because 'Its on Twatter, so its rubbish'.

Like most things, Twitter is what you put into it. Bookmark idiots, you get idiocy. Bookmark people who actually have some form for knowing what they are talking, and at least the first 2 or 3 posts you get very likely are gold. You dont have to read the following posts of course...

Edited November 9, 2022 by Stuart Galbraith

[Stuart Galbraith]

17 hours ago, Angrybk said:

I think well-moderated Reddit subforums can be pretty good. 

No doubt. But the difference is you have to go looking for what you want and subscribe it. Twitter throws random shit at you much of the time, but if you keep reinforcing what you are interested in, it actually comes to you. Ive rarely if every found anything interesting about history on Reddit. It is good for watching games you are interested in though, far better than twitter for that. Horses for courses I guess.

[sunday]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-09/meta-begins-slashing-11-000-jobs-across-company-zuckerberg-says

Quote

Zuckerberg Says ‘Sorry’ as Meta Begins Slashing Over 11,000 Jobs

Announced job cuts represent about 13% of Meta’s employees

Meta will extend its hiring freeze through the first quarter

(...)

 

[Angrybk]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/meta-facebook-layoffs/index.html

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, MySpace Tom wakes up in his villa in Bali, yawns and stretches, gently shoos the naked supermodels out of his bed and begins his grueling day as an exotic travel photographer. 

[Harold Jones]

11 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

...Like most things, Twitter is what you put into it. Bookmark idiots, you get idiocy. Bookmark people who actually have some form for knowing what they are talking, and at least the first 2 or 3 posts you get very likely are gold. You dont have to read the following posts of course...

I think I follow 12 people on twitter, mostly columnists a few entertainment folks and a college professor that I find interesting.  I rarely read comments on their posts and am mainly looking for links to their latest or upcoming work.  I've never tweeted, replied or responded* to anything I see on twitter.  I'm probably doing it wrong, but it works for me.

*I reject all follow requests

[Murph]

I also reject follow requests, and I have been on a 'bot killing spree on Twitter.  I follow quite a few (mostly Linux channels and JayzTwoCents).  

[rmgill]

IowaHawk? 
 

 

[Harold Jones]

No, I did for a while, but the volume of hotrod posts was annoying.  I'm not a car guy and they drowned out the stuff of his that I did like.  I've unfollowed several folks just because their tweet volume was exhausting.  

[sunday]

This could be a joke, but belongs in this thread

[rmgill]

*Max Cady Laugh*

[Josh]

From what I’ve heard from others in the tech industry he’s running it into the ground from every direction. He’s fired critical staff (and I’ve heard just today attempted to rehire some of them), alienated a fair number of verified users, and advertising is bailing left and right. I suspect twitter clears out and goes the Friendster/MySpace route inside a year as people simply find another platform and the bills keep piling up. Not sure what musk was shooting for but I think he missed it.

[sunday]