I think there's something to be said for the idea that the plan is to make T more like Chinese "all in one" services where you use it to talk to your friends, read words from famous people, get news, send money to friends, pay for stuff, (see porn? sure), microtransactions that aren't annoying because it's all in 1. Do I have any proof that's the plan? Nope.
Also I'm surprised by the fact that you can lose 50/60% of your workforce and still the core business system works. If this *remains* true over the next few weeks/months of staff reduction, then that alone is an amazing thing. I don't know anything more about T than any other company, but the companies I do know more about could not survive losing that many people.
While I share your assessment that the apparent treatment of employees (ex- or otherwise) has not been great, and I also disagree with EM's apparent belief that 80 long forced "crunch" hours by 1 good engineer is actually more effective than 40 (flexing longer if they're voluntarily caught up in a great idea) hours by 2 good engineers (conditional on being able to retain 2 good engineers), the general old fashioned 80's leverage buy out logic of "this company has too much overhead and could be generating a lot more revenue from X Y and Z and therefore I should buy it and do that" is absolutely true. Whether "doing that" can actually be done... we'll see! The great part is I don't care either way!
One thing I would like to know: almost nothing on twitter is patented or copyrighted, right? And you are happily able to use the twitter API to say, embed posts? The actual logic in what is presented to users IS complicated, but lots of people would be happy with a far less complicated one (like tweetdeck's: here is what the people you follow said). Why couldn't you scrape all of twitters' content, (rehost if T blocks you), call it Totally Not Twitter (TM), and then remove/add features from your version of the actual user interface, enable crossposting (so no on either side loses anything) and then bribe users to officially convert to TNT with the new amazing features you add/remove, or just straight up bribe them. Seems a lot cheaper than buying it for 44B.
I'm not sure about the copyright issues, but I don't think it's feasible to scrape a site at Twitter's scale. They would notice and blacklist the machines you were using to do the scraping, and potentially sue you for violating their terms of service or something.
Do the TOS actually prevent it though? I assume it's okay for me to download my or other's tweets (and the various metadata on them) and store them on my computer. I would think it would be then also okay for me to write my own new software to interact with them and present them in a new way, or add new buttons in my software to order the posts in a new way, or link them to other sites. Does twitter (or the poster) have any restrictive rights to the words you post on their site? I don't know!
Facebook will let you download a package containing all your data/pastinteractions/friends/etc..., with which you could build a FB clone, except there's a lot more to the FB UI than twitter's, though the structure of the FB data
"You may not...access or search or attempt to access or search the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) other than through our currently available, published interfaces that are provided by Twitter (and only pursuant to the applicable terms and conditions), unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Twitter (NOTE: crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited)"
Twitter's problems are not technical. SpaceX and Tesla are solving engineering and manufacturing problems. This is a very different market, and one Musk is far less familiar with and I feel is ill equipt to succeed in. Social media is about moderation. It has to be enjoyable to users and palatable to advertisers. You can't technology your way out of that.
For future Q&A post: Consumer household automation seems to be in a rut. I'm aware of automation efforts for lawn mowing, but household tasks like floor cleaning seems not demonstrably better than vacuum bots of 2005. What needs to happen before we see advances in robots that pick things up, clean walls and household surfaces/fixtures, or help with meal preparation? I want Rosie the Robot!
I like how you integrated and summarized Josh Barro's argument about Twitter's future. I read that back when he published it. I hadn't originally caught the fact that the sequencing of the changes would be useful to them both for users and Apple app review.
A couple future Q and A questions. I've seen people express surprise that the payroll numbers haven't been worse yet with how much the Fed has raised rates. I work in a highly interest rate sensitive job and while 2H22 has been an absolute horrorshow from a profit loss perspective industry wide there has been very minor actual layoffs up to this point (though the expectation is that there will be a bloodbath at year end). Rate sensitive tech companies are also really just getting started with layoffs. Given that some of the most sensitive are really only just getting started laying off workers, how much longer will it take before the less sensitive sectors also start laying off workers and the job numbers really do start looking bad?
Second question: the Fed's balance sheet run off would have to run for years at its current rate just to get back to pre-pandemic levels (and much longer to get back to pre-heavy QE usage). Assuming we have a recession soon and the Fed isn't going to maintain QT while cutting rates, is this level of Fed balance sheet the new normal? Is it just going to keep going up if the Fed is going to keep running bigger and longer QE than QT? Should we be concerned about that?
I think there's something to be said for the idea that the plan is to make T more like Chinese "all in one" services where you use it to talk to your friends, read words from famous people, get news, send money to friends, pay for stuff, (see porn? sure), microtransactions that aren't annoying because it's all in 1. Do I have any proof that's the plan? Nope.
Also I'm surprised by the fact that you can lose 50/60% of your workforce and still the core business system works. If this *remains* true over the next few weeks/months of staff reduction, then that alone is an amazing thing. I don't know anything more about T than any other company, but the companies I do know more about could not survive losing that many people.
While I share your assessment that the apparent treatment of employees (ex- or otherwise) has not been great, and I also disagree with EM's apparent belief that 80 long forced "crunch" hours by 1 good engineer is actually more effective than 40 (flexing longer if they're voluntarily caught up in a great idea) hours by 2 good engineers (conditional on being able to retain 2 good engineers), the general old fashioned 80's leverage buy out logic of "this company has too much overhead and could be generating a lot more revenue from X Y and Z and therefore I should buy it and do that" is absolutely true. Whether "doing that" can actually be done... we'll see! The great part is I don't care either way!
One thing I would like to know: almost nothing on twitter is patented or copyrighted, right? And you are happily able to use the twitter API to say, embed posts? The actual logic in what is presented to users IS complicated, but lots of people would be happy with a far less complicated one (like tweetdeck's: here is what the people you follow said). Why couldn't you scrape all of twitters' content, (rehost if T blocks you), call it Totally Not Twitter (TM), and then remove/add features from your version of the actual user interface, enable crossposting (so no on either side loses anything) and then bribe users to officially convert to TNT with the new amazing features you add/remove, or just straight up bribe them. Seems a lot cheaper than buying it for 44B.
I'm not sure about the copyright issues, but I don't think it's feasible to scrape a site at Twitter's scale. They would notice and blacklist the machines you were using to do the scraping, and potentially sue you for violating their terms of service or something.
Do the TOS actually prevent it though? I assume it's okay for me to download my or other's tweets (and the various metadata on them) and store them on my computer. I would think it would be then also okay for me to write my own new software to interact with them and present them in a new way, or add new buttons in my software to order the posts in a new way, or link them to other sites. Does twitter (or the poster) have any restrictive rights to the words you post on their site? I don't know!
Facebook will let you download a package containing all your data/pastinteractions/friends/etc..., with which you could build a FB clone, except there's a lot more to the FB UI than twitter's, though the structure of the FB data
"You may not...access or search or attempt to access or search the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) other than through our currently available, published interfaces that are provided by Twitter (and only pursuant to the applicable terms and conditions), unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Twitter (NOTE: crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without the prior consent of Twitter is expressly prohibited)"
All the best takes!
Also the URL/title in the browser bar says "27" but the post itself is 25. Maybe I have to upgrade my subscription tier to get the last 2! :)
Twitter's problems are not technical. SpaceX and Tesla are solving engineering and manufacturing problems. This is a very different market, and one Musk is far less familiar with and I feel is ill equipt to succeed in. Social media is about moderation. It has to be enjoyable to users and palatable to advertisers. You can't technology your way out of that.
For future Q&A post: Consumer household automation seems to be in a rut. I'm aware of automation efforts for lawn mowing, but household tasks like floor cleaning seems not demonstrably better than vacuum bots of 2005. What needs to happen before we see advances in robots that pick things up, clean walls and household surfaces/fixtures, or help with meal preparation? I want Rosie the Robot!
I like how you integrated and summarized Josh Barro's argument about Twitter's future. I read that back when he published it. I hadn't originally caught the fact that the sequencing of the changes would be useful to them both for users and Apple app review.
A couple future Q and A questions. I've seen people express surprise that the payroll numbers haven't been worse yet with how much the Fed has raised rates. I work in a highly interest rate sensitive job and while 2H22 has been an absolute horrorshow from a profit loss perspective industry wide there has been very minor actual layoffs up to this point (though the expectation is that there will be a bloodbath at year end). Rate sensitive tech companies are also really just getting started with layoffs. Given that some of the most sensitive are really only just getting started laying off workers, how much longer will it take before the less sensitive sectors also start laying off workers and the job numbers really do start looking bad?
Second question: the Fed's balance sheet run off would have to run for years at its current rate just to get back to pre-pandemic levels (and much longer to get back to pre-heavy QE usage). Assuming we have a recession soon and the Fed isn't going to maintain QT while cutting rates, is this level of Fed balance sheet the new normal? Is it just going to keep going up if the Fed is going to keep running bigger and longer QE than QT? Should we be concerned about that?