Musk just fired an engineer who was critical of him on his personal social media accounts

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: What Happens Down the Street From Us in Silicon Valley, and How We Can Make It Through the Day

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. It may contain mistakes, even though it has been reviewed by humans. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

We hope to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more in-depth sense of whats happening in Silicon Valley, and so on. Right now, there is only one story that anyone in tech care about and that is the story of what happens down the street from us in San Francisco.

In fact, there has been more external communication to Twitter.com than there has been to Twitter, the employees. So everything is just based on rumor. So we wake up. We look at all of the different channels, look at what our friends are saying to us, and hope we make it through the day.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

On the Errors of Getting Your Code Out Of A Robot Host Robot: The Orbifold’s Voice?

So what we’re going to do is talk to them, like have a normal interview. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.

When we started the show, we told ourselves we wouldn’t put onArtificial Intelligence unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. Twice in five episodes.

You were wrong about the not being a robot-hosted show and about the fact that Elon bought a bunch of stuff. It was two strikes for the man.

Yeah. Sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly that you don’t think it’s true. When I received the tip about the last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought that it was not true.

It doesn’t seem right to two of my sources. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!

Why is it not funny? Why is this so interesting? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People aren’t evaluated by how much code they write, right?

If you have a large amount of code, that is not a good thing. You might have done better if you eliminated some code. Sort of tidying it up. So.

Also, who makes the code? I was surprised that the coding programs had a Print button. That is not what you bring to the daily review of your code.

How Did Twitter Down Come Down? What Was Happening When Twitter Shuts Down? The Case of a New Code Printout Experiment

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. Engineers used variations of the word “crap” and “Twitter is down – the whole thing” as they worked to fix the problem.

All the people on the social networking site get a new notification about two hours later. Change of plans is similar. While they want to see your code, they don’t want you to let them know. Do you think we will need you to shred it if you have printed out any code?

The boss in charge doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone is kind of laughing at him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.

It’s not. The folks at the company are so focused on figuring out who is a great engineer that they are obsessed with it. He worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.

I have talked to people who are getting calls at night from random engineers and asked them who is really good on their team. Who do you think is the top performers? Some people are the low performers.

And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?

Who can we let go of? That’s sort of the main part of it. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. It was reported on Sunday that they were considering tying verifications to the Blue subscription.

Though many people subscribe to it, it’s never been a major source of revenue. People under pressure to make money quickly have been looking for new revenue ideas. One idea was to make people pay for a service in order to keep their verification badges.

Twitter Blue costs $5 a month. A few hours after I wrote that story, Alex Heath at “The Verge” reported that they were considering charging up to $20 a month to keep the verification badge. It is fair to say that made the entire time period melt down.

Yeah. Stephen King is the author of the horror novel “Carrie.” He was recently asked if he needed $20 a month to keep his blue check. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Wait, let me just say, Stephen King has written about some of the most terrifying horrors imaginable, and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification badge.

If anyone wanted to verify their identity, I think it would benefit most social networks. That would be great for the credibility of the whole thing. But it does come with a lot of questions that, so far, have mostly gone unanswered.

And I think that’s how a lot of journalists get verified. There is also a process. You can ask to be verified if you’re a celebrity or something. The verification is not about a status marker, we should say.

It’s not about, this person’s important. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. There was a way to allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they claimed to be.

I think it is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

Right. I think it’s fair to say that people have seen these checkmarks next to your name as a kind of status symbol over the years. It means that you are someone.

Right, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.

After that, users say no way will they pay $20 a month and that results in an entire TWaP meltdown. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. That is more than I pay for anything.

Like, just to keep my little check mark — like, that seems insane. Subsequently, Elon responds to Stephen King on Twitter and says, we need to pay the bills somehow. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8? Stephen King has been used as a pricing consultant.

I think there is a lot of right-wing circles inside the world of Elon, as well as in the world of right-wing circles, with the idea of the blue check, right? People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of, like, blue check mob of people on Twitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are sort of, like, self-important and care very deeply about their checkmarks.

And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. It is much more than making people pay to keep their badges. It’s also that if you pay, you could get a badge.

And it also just seems to me, like — I’m trying to keep an open mind. This could work. I have often thought that people who are power users of Twitter should be paying something for some of the features that are being talked about here.

It creates economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things. Maybe it should be a part of it.

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. There is still a lot of work to be done.

Life under the Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak-Out: Why Facebook and YouTube are going to be able to make a new social network

But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. The losses have made social media websites more vulnerable to catastrophic outages from the start.

Well, look, I liked it. People are very fond of this show. It kind of ushered in the era of short-form video that we’re living in now. Many people listen to the show, and they can probably recite a few vines from their memory.

I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? It is going to require a lot of effort from them. You are trying to start a new social network within TWITTER. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. We have to see if they can do it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: Why Is It So Hard? How Do We Have To Deal With Them?

That’s right. They are told that you have days to ship this. In some cases, you will be fired if this does not arrive by this date. If you are one hour past deadline, you will be fired.

People are sleeping very little. Some of them are scared, they are sleeping in their offices. Some of them have work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. It is serious for the people who have these jobs.

Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. How’s your day going so far? What do you think will happen today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. Most people have moved off of slack and into other channels. This is an up and down thing because we don’t have any contact with anyone inside.

There is stress. While clearly looking for a way out, I feel like I am in a lot of stress because I don’t have any support from the people above me. There have been many rumor mill-based scares.

First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s tiring. I am aware that we are paid well.

We have money to sit on. Some people don’t. It is nerve-racking and we are entering a tough hiring market for tech. And also, we’re entering the holidays.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: A Game Plan for the Next Few Days (Extended Abstract) – How Do You Deal With Your C-Suite?

So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.

That is accurate. We have not gotten any information other than what trickles down to us. The Comms is very sparse. There is really nobody answering, even messages in the company-wide channels.

It is almost like a scavenger hunt that you have to do in order to figure out what you are supposed to be doing.

You have heard about some of the code reviews. I have seen examples of people saying that code was written entirely by them and not crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hope that they will be on some preferred status list.

Absolutely. They want volume, not quality. No matter how insignificant or garbage the code is, everybody is sharing it. [SIGHS]

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Blind: Where do you come from? How do you know what you’re doing, and how often do you have to work? What do you need to do?

I got a message from a manager that said, basically, if you do not know what you are doing, you need to work on something. Work on anything.

Someone sent me a post and I would like to read it. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.

Several people have sent this post to me. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. I won’t read the whole thing. The headline is “I cannot cope.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

What do I do when I’m not at work? The role of Elon, who was supposed to go to work before he was fired

And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. If we miss delivery management will fire us, even if it is outside our control. We will be gone if we don’t work at weekends. We are gone if we leave or take PTO.

People are working long hours. I work around 20 hours per day. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. I worry about it even when I don’t work. I am unable to cope. I’m an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.”

The people who are ignored until they get fired and the people being pulled into these task forces are in two different camps. The best place to be is in the people who will be fired.

What Happens to the Immigrant Population in the United States if you’re a Technologist and You’re on a Visa

I am stricken with the feelings of this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment, and in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves, applying to jobs.

And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. They have not been told anything.

We are moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary and so we are crying, and more than just privileged tech people. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

“The incumbent has the advantage of scale, and even in a situation where you have kind of a polarizing figure like Musk take over Twitter, people are realizing that the newer platforms are not nearly as effective from a one-to-many, getting your message out there,” said Tom Forte, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Despite the fact that there may be disgruntled consumers, they’re still tweeting.”

I don’t think it is because they are sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. There is more than one truth to that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.

What Do You Expect to See From Twitter? What Are You Meant to Care About Twitter? Why Have We Missed Twitter Before Elon?

I would like to know if you have been thinking about the degree to which it could be at risk, as well as what fears you might have regarding the future of the service.

I would think that everyone is going to leave in protest. A lot of people may stay in this situation. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

Now that community is being shifted and changed. Heavy tweeters have been leaving the platform. And it’s not just people leaving the platform. The content that is popular on the platform is changing towards more niche communities. So there is part of this that was an unfortunate direction that Twitter, pre-Elon, was already headed in anyway.

Life Under the Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: What’s the Best Way for You to Get Your Work Out There?

I was scared and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.

Is it possible to be uncertain. There are people who are unsure if they should continue with their work. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.

Privacy concerns or possible misuse of new features are raised even in the lowest parts of engineering. They only do one job, write random code that no one will ever see. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: A Case Study Against A Bose-Einstein Condensate

That’s complicated because no one really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that this should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. And everything just sort of came from there.

I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. He will lean into it if it serves him.

I have been there for a long time now and have seen the company grow in a number of ways. I agree with the people that there is a lot of managers and engineers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow. Management has never been the company’s strong point.

So that aside, you don’t go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speakers Out: Is That the Right Thing? The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Alright, let’s start. There is an idea that if it was moved faster, it would be funnier. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?

I get lost in my mind. When priorities shifted we need to have this done by Friday, which is normal. That’s a little stressful. It may be worth putting in a couple more hours. Need to get it done. It makes sense.

The sheer scale is something that distinguishes this place. I don’t think I’ll be asked to do a completely redesign of Twitter Blue by Friday. That is completely ludicrous.

The amount of systems that need to be touched on is comparable to raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You also have to work with lots of other people, right?

Yeah. If you look at the feature sets that have been reported on, you will see that he wants to add in some features, like a ranking of blue check users higher than others in the stack. They have to completely reshift how that entire process works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.

Yeah, yeah. What time frame would you be given that would make you say it seems like a reasonable amount of time to redo the account?

It depends. It could take quite a while because of the infrastructure changes required, and the platform is a bit slow. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.

I think there would be something that could be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: Can I Make Sense Of The Social Media? An Algorithm Based Approach

This is a social problem as well as an engineering problem. We need to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What will people do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? It seems like these deadlines are so short that this should be released without any testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They will be set loose.

Yeah. There is a section about privacy and data. We don’t do anything with user data so we are not worried about that. A blue check on a profile.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk And Twitter Employees Talk Out: What Are Your Thoughts About Some Product Changes that Musk and His Inner Circle Think about?

There are a couple of things. It depends on where you are in the leadership stack, as far as Musk and his people. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. And hopefully Musk likes it functionally.

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.

God. I want to know what you think of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by Musk and his inner circle, including the charging $8 a month for Twitter verification, bringing back vines and so on. What are your thoughts on those proposals? Do you think they are good ideas?

I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. I do not know if this is a goal of the project, but my understanding was that we might be able to serve ads to people that are not logged in.

And so just real quick, so what that means is, before Musk, when you were not logged into Twitter, you’d just basically see a box asking you to log in.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Is It Really Necessary to Be That Kind of Thing?

The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. The cynical part of me thinks that it’s too little, too late. You know? There is a hill to climb called TikTok.

But sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor gives us a foothold in the market and could potentially lead us to launch something.

We have at least the media and are trying to build a product like that. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.

It would be the most boring. You could probably make a really good ethereal horror movie out of walking around aimlessly and not knowing what’s going on.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Why do two Twitter employees speak out? What do they want to say about a time when all employees are talking about what they do, or why they don’t

There’s no communications. So the only people talking are people in a corner. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. Everyone is wondering if we will ever see him. Is it time to stop doing my work? Do they still serve lunch?

So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. Is it something you want to do in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is real. I mean, culture seeps through the product. Some of the way that the company behaved was due to people being so invested in it. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.

People have seen this. So now we’re moving into the phase equivalent to “move fast and break things,” with no care for the people who are using it, which just sort of defeats the point.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: An Insight into a Young Man’s Twitter Work Hours View of Labor Law Litigation

Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. He seems to think that labor law lawsuits are going to come out.

So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”

And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. His email address is Kevin. Roose —

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. Paula Szuchman edits we. The episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was done by a young man.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

What Makes Elon Musk a Truly Local Hero? An Ittoops-Powell Perspective on the Tiny Talk Town Twitterverse

Elisheba Ittoops, Dan Powell, and a number of others have created original music. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. All talk relating to Musk is in Tiny Talk Town.

In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.

A small group of people have influence on the micro-messaging service. According to internal company research, the heavy users who write in English make 90 percent of all revenue and account for less than 10% of monthly users.

It would be easy for a disproportionate number of active users to think that his experience on the micro-messaging service is different for everyone than it is. It’s the same for journalists. Almost half of all users on the site don’t bother to write a single word about it, and most of their posts are replies to other people’s posts. They watch live sports or check in on celebrity news and then go about their lives. They are called lurkers.

Lurking is not doom scrolling, a practice that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic when people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. It is a simple approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos of Newtwitter, by quietly lurk and observe. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. You must disengage while you send a twit. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

Why Twitter Users Aren’t Scrooking: Why Musk and Platformer are Not Ready to Disturbate the AI Armies of Twitter

It’s currently unclear what caused the issues — reportedly even Twitter engineers aren’t sure what happened yet, according to The Information. The report says that a change resulted in web requests being misinterpreted. Musk reportedly sent out an email to Twitter employees asking them to pause work on new features “in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. The company stopped free access to its platform on February 1st, which ended third party clients and made it difficult for outside researchers to study the network. The company is working on building a paid app for developers to use.

Currently, many Twitter API users can download up to two million tweets from the past seven days for free every month. Academic institutions can download unlimited amounts from the entire archive for free. Researchers can make very intricate maps of how users relate to each other with large datasets and that information is useful for understanding online communities.

“You look at some of the conferences we attended, you know, 50% of the social computing papers would be about Twitter and sometimes even more, because that was the data that we had access to,” says Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online information dynamics during crises, including disinformation.

But in the latest change to the social media service since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company last year, Twitter announced Thursday that it would start charging users at least $100 a month for using its data pipeline starting Feb. 13, with one exception – users that tweet less than 1,500 times a month, an average of twice an hour or less.

The move will make it more expensive to run many automated accounts, known as bots. Some bots promote scams and propaganda, while others are useful or fun for many users, such as those that highlight every change the New York Times makes to its story headlines or flag an earthquake.

Musk has long expressed his desire to rid the platform of “bot armies.” When Twitter first announced last Thursday that it will start charging for API usage without information of pricing or exceptions, bot watchers on the platform bemoaned the imminent demise of creations they loved. It was stated on Saturday that free access will be maintained through the provision of good content.

No researchers were spared if some of the bots were spared. The change will make it difficult for researchers such as Starbird to look at user behavior and information on the platform over the course of many years.

Earlier this week, after Twitter first announced that it will start charging for the API, a group of research institutions, advocacy groups and individual researchers from around the world issued an open letter calling on Twitter to maintain access for researchers so that public-interest research could continue. In a statement, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said that Twitter should be making data access easier, not harder. As of Wednesday, Twitter did not respond to a request from NPR sent last week for more information about its decision.

Users’ timelines are shaped not only by who they follow but also algorithmic recommendation, so players seeking influence can game it to amplify its message.

While the social media landscape has splintered in the past few years, Twitter still serves as a guide post because narratives brewing in smaller platforms could bubble up on Twitter.

Several new services were launched or gained traction by appealing to users who were uneasy with Musk’s decisions to cut staff, rethink moderation policies and allow previously banned accounts to be restored.

Users with access to the Twitter API can upload and download data in bulk to and from the platform using a computer program, bypassing the main user interface.

Starbird, Twitter and TikTok: What Have We Learned in the 2024 US Presidential Election? Comments on Musk’s Twitter, Telegram, Twitter, and Reddit

Starbird says that a lack of data will make it far harder for researchers to look at the narratives they missed in real time.

By giving users well-documented API access, Twitter’s data has been more transparent than other major social media platforms. Meta’s offering, CrowdTangle, does not provide straightforward ways to download data in real time and in bulk the way Twitter does. The company is winding it down, but has not said if it will offer a replacement. Meta did not answer questions about CrowdTangle’s future.

TikTok announced last year that it’s testing a research API, and is “planning to expand availability in the US in the coming weeks.” The company told NPR in an email. The company has come under criticism in the past year for allowing disinformation to spread on its platform. Because of its Chinese ownership, it faced bipartisan scrutiny.

If the current level of access ceases Starbird’s team is looking for ways to use the social media platform. They intend to focus on Telegram, TikTok and Reddit along with Twitter for the 2024 presidential election while collaborating with teams that monitor other platforms.

We have tended to work within constraints for a long time. Starbird thinks there will be new innovative ways to use the data on the micro-lending platform. A lot of that creativity will be better spent on other platforms.

After a couple of months, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. A recent study shows that since Musk takeover, the number of people who use the social media platform in the US has gone down.

Multiple sources with a direct knowledge of the meeting said he said it was ridiculous. I have more than a hundred million followers, and I only get tens of thousands of impressions.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. In April 2015, they told him that Musk was at his peak popularity in the search rankings with a score of 100. He has a score of nine. Engineers had looked into the topic of whether Musk’s reach had been artificially restricted but found no proof of that.

Musk told the engineer that they were fired. The engineer’s name will not be made public in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.

Dissatisfied with the work of engineers so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

An employee complains that Twitter fires don’t solve the “momentum problem” of putting out fires. What do we actually do at Twitter?

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my perspective, we mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.

One employee said that he would say things that didn’t make sense even at night. When he comes to us he will tell us that one person cannot do something on the platform and that we have to chase that outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. The standard greeting when people pass each other is to ask where you interviewers are and where you have offers. The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.

The employee said people don’t talk about work things anymore. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleauge on Signal than I do on chat. In the team channel it was not uncommon to discuss what everyone did over the weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

People are the smartest at the Silicon Valley, but what do they really need? Employees say the same about Twitter Blue and how Musk relaunched Twitter

One person explained that when a question is posed, one must ask what is the least fireable response they can have to it.

(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. An employee says there are a few believers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists.

The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

The employee claimed that if there was more thought into the decisions and less fire from the hip it could do some good. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. You can not be the smartest person in the room all the time.

Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.

“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”

Twitter vs. Instagram: How to get your users to switch to a news feed you don’t need? An interview with Sarah Oh

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.

Sarah Oh lost her job as an advisor to the human rights team at the social media company after its takeover by Musk, but she is trying to start a new company with a friend.

T2 was launched in a partnership with Gabor Cselle, who was previously employed by both the micro-Blogging website and the search engine. Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits. But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

“We really do want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing risk of things like abuse and harassment, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to deliver on that,” Oh told CNN.

The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. While some apps like T2 strongly resemble Twitter, others take a different approach.

The Artifact, a personalized news feed powered by artificial intelligence that was announced last month by the co-founders of Instagram earned it comparisons to micro-blogging site Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.

All of these apps are trying to get the users to switch to a news feed they aren’t used to, at least for a while.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/tech/twitter-competitors/index.html

Tweeting about the Cohost Outage: The Story of a Change in T2 and the Persistence of an Avatar, the Challenge of Twitter and the Company’s Future

Cohost currently has 130,000 users, only 20,000 of which are what Cohost considers active users, according to Kaplan. Oh says that T2 still has a waiting list in the five digits. In November of last year, Mastodon reached 2.5 million users, but has since fallen to about 1.5 million users in a possible cautionary tale.

“People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.

CNN reported recently that Rochko told them that the platform cannot continue to go viral. There is a cycle of media news and attention that goes away after some time but behind it there is organic growth which we still have today.

Outage tracker site DownDetector showed more than 8,000 Twitter outage reports around noon on Monday. The issue of whether or not users could access the platform was a point of discussion among people on the social network.

Chaos took over the timeline, as users tweeted vociferously about the outage — often illustrating their points with images that no one could see because they wouldn’t load.

Musk said that a small change in the company’s platform had huge ramifications after an investor posted a picture of the site with a large number of failures. The code stack is brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

In many ways, Monday’s outage represented the culmination of Musk’s leadership at the company so far. He has been working to cut costs with his $44 billion purchase of the company.

How to retrain a single engineer in a large network to restore critical IT systems, or how to fire a system employee: A case study

This allowed for a single engineer to be hired on a major project that was linked to several critical systems both users and employees depended on.

It took all morning for the service to be restored. This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company, says a current employee.