Twitter - Should I stay or should I go

[stevil]

To steal a phrase from The Clash - "Should I stay or should I go"
We hear lots of news lately about Elon Musk's heavy hand blazing a trail of destruction through his newly acquired company Twitter.
He fired half his staff and with his heavy hand he has been monitoring and spying on staff internal conversations on private slack channels and firing people that have said negative things about him.
He has demanded people to work in office and to commit to long hours at high intensity or leave. Early reporting is suggesting that the majority of staff are choosing to leave.
Way to go Elon, how to, within the space of two weeks turn a workforce from highly engaged, passionate, valued, proud and excited, to disgusted, disengaged, unvalued, disappointed and wanting to leave.

Anyway, this thread isn't about staff. This is about users and how they might be answering the question "Should I stay or should I go"
There doesn't seem to be much media focus on this.
We have heard about the Blue Check fiasco, where user's could trust that celebreties and people and organisations with official positions had been verified by Twitter and so the messages coming from accounts with the Blue Check could be trusted as coming from the people and organisations that user think these are coming from. But now with the Blue Check just meaning that a subscription fee has been paid, now users have no idea who is saying what.
But other than this Blue Check, we don't really hear much about the impact on users.
Are users staying or leaving?

Users Leaving Twitter May Be Trending Worldwide But New Poll Proves Otherwise

Around 40% of those polled claimed they were going nowhere.

www.digitalinformationworld.com

After Elon Musk’s abrupt takeover of Twitter, many people saw and heard so many SEOs and marketers take the bold but necessary step of leaving the platform.

But a recent poll that was conducted in this regard proved that users are not ready to leave just yet.

The bizzareness of the above narrative is that from that linked to poll, 21% have said that they have left already (which is massive) and a further 12% have said that they are planning to leave. This makes 33% of the user base (at least those responding to the poll) have said that they have already left or are planning to leave. Which completely contradicts the article which says "proved that users are not ready to leave just yet"

Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show

The heaviest tweeters, vital to its business, have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, an internal researcher wrote. It underscores a challenge for Elon Musk.

www.reuters.com

Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.
These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
...interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users. Tweets on those topics, which have helped Twitter burnish an image as the world’s "digital town square," as Musk once called it, are also the most desirable for advertisers.

So it seems that Twitter was facing some big problems (even before Musk's takeover) of the active users becoming disengaged and less active and moving towards links and conversations that are less appealing to advertisers.

Celebrities are starting to leave Twitter. Here's a running list.

TV powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, "Madam Secretary" actor Téa Leoni and others in the entertainment world say they're dropping the platform after Elon Musk's takeover.

www.nbcnews.com

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter has some in Hollywood heading for the exit.

"Grey's Anatomy" creator Shonda Rhimes and others in the entertainment industry say they plan to quit the platform now that it is owned by Musk, a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who has vowed to make sweeping changes — including potentially reversing the ban on former President Donald Trump.

"Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye," Rhimes tweeted to her nearly 2 million Twitter followers Saturday afternoon, two days after Musk closed his $44 billion deal to purchase the service.

I don't know what the above means. Is this just a few anecdotes. Are all celebreties thinking this way, or just some? Are celebretities significant to keeping Twitter interesting for other users????

Anyway, I'm not a Twitter user, I don't have an account. I am just interested in whether Musk is destroying this platform or not. Twitter is obviously a very significant platform to many people.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

I'll touch on both sub-topics...the workforce side, and the end user side.

First the workforce:
I can see both sides on this one as someone who's been on both the "worker-bee" and "Senior Level" ends of the tech world dynamic.

"Highly engaged and Passionate workforce, that's proud and excited" is a "nice to have", but shouldn't be ranked above "delivering results and a product that's sustainable and not losing money"

Based on the statements of both Elon, and the former head Jack Dorsey, it sounds like their pre-Elon business model wasn't. Dorsey even apologized in a Tweet saying he takes responsibility and in his own words "tried to grow too much too quickly".

And let's not mince words here...anyone else taking over that company would've had to lay people off. Mark Z had to, as did Amazon (and a number of other tech big-names) The reason the staff is so bent out of shape about Elon is because there's social/political friction. Clearly the notion of "working for an eccentric rich guy with some wild ideas" wasn't their main gripe, they had no problem working for Jack Dorsey.

As far as them being excited and passionate...were they really excited and passionate about the type of work itself? Or were they passionate about the perks, the cachet, and the fact that they got to be part of squashing their political rivals?

I imagine a lot of people would love going to an office where you can take an hour long meditation break on the roof, have top-shelf coffee shops on campus, having local artisan chefs brought in 3 times a week by the "culinary team" to make you food, and having an art gallery to take a stroll through, and thinking of ways to silence people of society who disagree with them.

But that's not sustainable if the numbers aren't lining up in your favor...at the end of the day, you're getting paid to do a job, and that job needs to translate to revenue.


From the end user side:
If people want to flee from Twitter, I see that as a good thing. I don't like the idea that the town square for speech is consolidated in the hands of 2-3 companies. It's too much power for an entity to have because eventually the people running the show will let their biases control their content moderation policies.

I'd rather have a world where there were lots of smaller options spanning the spectrum and have accounts on all of them to discuss different types of topics. For instance, I have an account here on CF for when I want to debate certain topics in a controlled environment and "play by the rules", and others I'm a member of where I can let my hair down a little and get a little more loose with the language and discuss things that can't be discussed here.

 

[public hermit]

I imagine a lot of people would love going to an office where you can take an hour long meditation break on the roof, have top-shelf coffee shops on campus, having local artisan chefs brought in 3 times a week by the "culinary team" to make you food, and having an art gallery to take a stroll through, and thinking of ways to silence people of society who disagree with them.

Yeah, I have no pity for these folks. They can get another great job. If they chose to quit, they weren't hurting for it like a lot of folks who have less than desirable jobs but can't afford to just decide to quit. Cry me a river.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Yeah, I have no pity for these folks. They can get another great job. If they chose to quit, they weren't hurting for it like a lot of folks who have less than desirable jobs but can't afford to just decide to quit. Cry me a river.

If you look back at some articles from 3-4 years ago about the Twitter HQ... the employees there were spoiled. And it shows based on the fact that they're acting like oppressed because someone is asking them to work 40 hours a week, and that they get fired for tagging their boss in a message where they're trash talking him.

I'm thinking "oh, you mean like how it's always been? at literally almost every other job??"

If I logged into my company's Teams chat, and tagged my CEO in a company wide message calling him a "Petulant man-child", I'd be getting called in for "a little meeting" on Monday morning that would end in me getting my walking papers.


They've had it too good for too long. "I wanna take a 45 minute stroll around the art gallery after my 30-minute coffee break where I had a coffee made by a 5-star barista using organic Jamaican blue mountain beans...if he tells me I can't do that, then he's a stupid fascist!" isn't gonna fly at 99.9999% of tech jobs out there.

 

[public hermit]

If you look back at some articles from 3-4 years ago about the Twitter HQ... the employees there were spoiled. And it shows based on the fact that they're acting like oppressed because someone is asking them to work 40 hours a week, and that they get fired for tagging their boss in a message where they're trash talking him.

I'm thinking "oh, you mean like how it's always been? at literally almost every other job??"

If I logged into my company's Teams chat, and tagged my CEO in a company wide message calling him a "Petulant man-child", I'd be getting called in for "a little meeting" on Monday morning that would end in me getting my walking papers.


They've had it too good for too long. "I wanna take a 45 minute stroll around the art gallery after my 30-minute coffee break where I had a coffee made by a 5-star barista using organic Jamaican blue mountain beans...if he tells me I can't do that, then he's a stupid fascist!" isn't gonna fly at 99.9999% of tech jobs out there.

I guess it's all relative to one's experience, but I just can't feel badly for them.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

I guess it's all relative to one's experience, but I just can't feel badly for them.

I've been through the ups and downs through a couple different organizations.

Though my "ups" weren't as extravagant as what Twitter HQ employees had... sure, it was a bummer when new leadership came in and they had to cancel "everyone leaves at 2pm between Memorial Day and Labor Day", and had to stop the "everyone gets a $4000 quarterly bonus check" and "if you have an important family matter, you can take off without it counting against your vacation hours" when the company couldn't support that anymore, I wouldn't have dreamed of badmouthing the new CEO (very publicly) claiming that "this is tyranny" when I know for a fact a lot of people were abusing the perks and not pulling their own weight.

The fact that so many of them are bent out of shape about it tells me that they know, deep down, that they've been coasting on the gravy train, and are concerned that they're maybe not as good as they'd like people to think at the task they were supposed to perform.

If someone is a mid-level software engineer for an outfit the size of Twitter, that should be all they need on their resume to land a well-paying job at almost any company in the IT department...the fact that they're acting like their victimized tells me that they're either A) not as good as they think they are, and will be quickly exposed, or B) they've set their standards too high based on their previous arrangement.


For lack of a better term, I interviewed a "Microsoft reject" (someone who worked for them for 2 years, and just wasn't working out), and we ended up offering him a very fair salary based on what his skill level actually was, he acted like he was insulted by our offer.

 

[Neostarwcc]

I always hated Twitter because of the low character limits. I have a lot to say usually that's greater than 150 characters.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

I always hated Twitter because of the low character limits. I have a lot to say usually that's greater than 150 characters.

That could be a good pitch to Twitter execs... "allow your messages to be longer than a standard SMS message segment" (which is 160)

 

[timothyu]

One has to wonder about people who have accounts on Twitter that are threatening to walk away. Realistically, who is going to miss them?

 

[Neostarwcc]

That could be a good pitch to Twitter execs... "allow your messages to be longer than a standard SMS message segment" (which is 160)

Yeah I hate texting for the same reason. They could offer that for the $8/mo. Beats just getting a verified checkmark for half of a WoW subscription. Lol.

 

[Matt5]

I love this video:

One day in the life of twitter employee - YouTube

No wonder there was a mass culling of employees.

I am staying on Twitter. I want to see how this Elon project turns out.

 

[timothyu]

Musk will do what he always does, abandon any preconceived notions and start from the ground up.

 

[MehGuy]

I only lurk on Twitter, never post there. This website is the only place I really interact with on the internet and even then, I limit the number of political discussions I engage in here. One thing to read political debates, another to actually participate in them. I cannot speak for others but being involved greatly raises my anxiety and obsessive thoughts.

Thinking about how active I used to be on the internet when I was younger, makes me queasy.

 

[HARK!]

I love this video:

One day in the life of twitter employee - YouTube

No wonder there was a mass culling of employees.

I am staying on Twitter. I want to see how this Elon project turns out.

I've seen this video before. It's good to see that Musk is putting his new employees to work.

As far as users leaving Twitter, I've seen some Far-Left users, who are probably more out of touch with reality than the employee who posted this video, say that they are leaving.

I'm all for it. Hopefully it will bring some balance back from censorship of reality.

If the Left wants to capitulate their cozy little hive to the Right, and censor themselves; I'm OK with that too.

It's still a free country, in theory.

 

[timothyu]

 

[Occams Barber]

To steal a phrase from The Clash - "Should I stay or should I go"
We hear lots of news lately about Elon Musk's heavy hand blazing a trail of destruction through his newly acquired company Twitter.
He fired half his staff and with his heavy hand he has been monitoring and spying on staff internal conversations on private slack channels and firing people that have said negative things about him.
He has demanded people to work in office and to commit to long hours at high intensity or leave. Early reporting is suggesting that the majority of staff are choosing to leave.
Way to go Elon, how to, within the space of two weeks turn a workforce from highly engaged, passionate, valued, proud and excited, to disgusted, disengaged, unvalued, disappointed and wanting to leave.

Anyway, this thread isn't about staff. This is about users and how they might be answering the question "Should I stay or should I go"
There doesn't seem to be much media focus on this.
We have heard about the Blue Check fiasco, where user's could trust that celebreties and people and organisations with official positions had been verified by Twitter and so the messages coming from accounts with the Blue Check could be trusted as coming from the people and organisations that user think these are coming from. But now with the Blue Check just meaning that a subscription fee has been paid, now users have no idea who is saying what.
But other than this Blue Check, we don't really hear much about the impact on users.
Are users staying or leaving?

Users Leaving Twitter May Be Trending Worldwide But New Poll Proves Otherwise

Around 40% of those polled claimed they were going nowhere.

www.digitalinformationworld.com

After Elon Musk’s abrupt takeover of Twitter, many people saw and heard so many SEOs and marketers take the bold but necessary step of leaving the platform.

But a recent poll that was conducted in this regard proved that users are not ready to leave just yet.

The bizzareness of the above narrative is that from that linked to poll, 21% have said that they have left already (which is massive) and a further 12% have said that they are planning to leave. This makes 33% of the user base (at least those responding to the poll) have said that they have already left or are planning to leave. Which completely contradicts the article which says "proved that users are not ready to leave just yet"

Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show

The heaviest tweeters, vital to its business, have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, an internal researcher wrote. It underscores a challenge for Elon Musk.

www.reuters.com

Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.
These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
...interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users. Tweets on those topics, which have helped Twitter burnish an image as the world’s "digital town square," as Musk once called it, are also the most desirable for advertisers.

So it seems that Twitter was facing some big problems (even before Musk's takeover) of the active users becoming disengaged and less active and moving towards links and conversations that are less appealing to advertisers.

Celebrities are starting to leave Twitter. Here's a running list.

TV powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, "Madam Secretary" actor Téa Leoni and others in the entertainment world say they're dropping the platform after Elon Musk's takeover.

www.nbcnews.com

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter has some in Hollywood heading for the exit.

"Grey's Anatomy" creator Shonda Rhimes and others in the entertainment industry say they plan to quit the platform now that it is owned by Musk, a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who has vowed to make sweeping changes — including potentially reversing the ban on former President Donald Trump.

"Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye," Rhimes tweeted to her nearly 2 million Twitter followers Saturday afternoon, two days after Musk closed his $44 billion deal to purchase the service.

I don't know what the above means. Is this just a few anecdotes. Are all celebreties thinking this way, or just some? Are celebretities significant to keeping Twitter interesting for other users????

Anyway, I'm not a Twitter user, I don't have an account. I am just interested in whether Musk is destroying this platform or not. Twitter is obviously a very significant platform to many people.

I have just deactivated my Twitter account. I've had it for ten years but have never used it as a poster or a lurker.

I find Musk's attitude to his staff disgusting. While they may have enjoyed better than normal working conditions this does not justify Musk acting like some cotton baron straight out of the 19th century. Workers, like employers, need to be treated with reasonable dignity.

Given Musk's attitude to freedom of speech I also suspect that Twitter is on its way to becoming yet another social media cesspool. With luck Musk's mismanagent will send Twitter to the wall.

It's also becoming obvious that if you give enough idiots anonymous access to an electronic megaphone there's a good chance, they can destroy a country.

OB

 

[HARK!]

I have just deactivated my Twitter account.

Excellent!

 

[timothyu]

Workers, like employers, need to be treated with reasonable dignity.

Like they treated all those with an opinion on Twitter?

 

[timothyu]

It's also becoming obvious that if you give enough idiots anonymous access to an electronic megaphone there's a good chance, they can destroy a country.

That is what has happened with the internet. The minority groups feel themselves to be the majority now but realistically only in cyberland. Even that is in doubt but he who makes the most noise and all that

 

[stevil]

One has to wonder about people who have accounts on Twitter that are threatening to walk away. Realistically, who is going to miss them?

I don't think that is the point of why they are leaving.

I don't really know anything about Twitter, I've never used it. So I don't know why people are leaving, but I can imagine that some might be outraged at how Elon is treating employees, and some might be confused now as to the identity of accounts making tweets and therefore losing trust in whether the comments are coming from a trusted source or a troll.