Twitter staff ‘super stressed’ over EMusk chaos(scmp.com)
scmp.com
Twitter staff ‘super stressed’ over EMusk chaos
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3173927/twitter-staff-super-stressed-over-elon-musk-chaos-after-tesla-ceo
9 comments
Let's be real, if Elon buying 9% of your company makes you 'super stressed' you are probably in out to lunch peacetime mode anyways and need to be shaken up. Imagine working for Twitter but 'needing support to get through the week' because of board room drama... And Elon deciding not to join the board interrupted their 'monthly day of rest'. Wow.
The Twitter customer is an abstract concept. There's no answering to a single perhaps unpredictable customer, simply a collection of metrics. On aggregate these metrics are real, but individually they are not [1].
To take a car analogy. Imaging Twitter was a mechanic's garage. A customer has their exhaust fixed. But the main point of coming to your garage is to hang out with everyone else in the cafe talking about their car parked outside in the parking lot. And as everyone else uses your garage so does this customer. They could use the Mastodon garage chain and would get their exhaust fixed but they don't coz the point of their car isn't to get from A to B but to show off their car of which the garage cafe and parking lot is a big part of the experience.
But they think you could do a better job, so they buy 9%, or 14%, or some %, of the garage. Now you're worried your garage product, largely satellite to the core product of a garage long since fixed, the core service of your garage is infact provided for free in your garage as it is in the Mastodon garages, might get criticised. Say, you bake cinnamon brownies in the cafe. People buy your buy your brownies. But it's never that clear they buy your brownies because they're good brownies or just that people need something to snack on in the garage while they hang out looking at their cars. Perhaps this new owner doesn't like the brownies. Perhaps they love them. Perhaps they don't care, ignore them, but have big ideas for improving the seating or cleanliness of the bathroom. Who knows. Now, for the first time perhaps in your life, you're actually answerable to a customer with a voice.
[1] This excludes conventional media juggernauts and Twitter's deal with them to steer the platform to what it is now.
To take a car analogy. Imaging Twitter was a mechanic's garage. A customer has their exhaust fixed. But the main point of coming to your garage is to hang out with everyone else in the cafe talking about their car parked outside in the parking lot. And as everyone else uses your garage so does this customer. They could use the Mastodon garage chain and would get their exhaust fixed but they don't coz the point of their car isn't to get from A to B but to show off their car of which the garage cafe and parking lot is a big part of the experience.
But they think you could do a better job, so they buy 9%, or 14%, or some %, of the garage. Now you're worried your garage product, largely satellite to the core product of a garage long since fixed, the core service of your garage is infact provided for free in your garage as it is in the Mastodon garages, might get criticised. Say, you bake cinnamon brownies in the cafe. People buy your buy your brownies. But it's never that clear they buy your brownies because they're good brownies or just that people need something to snack on in the garage while they hang out looking at their cars. Perhaps this new owner doesn't like the brownies. Perhaps they love them. Perhaps they don't care, ignore them, but have big ideas for improving the seating or cleanliness of the bathroom. Who knows. Now, for the first time perhaps in your life, you're actually answerable to a customer with a voice.
[1] This excludes conventional media juggernauts and Twitter's deal with them to steer the platform to what it is now.
I agree that it seems a little bit over-dramatic, but seeing as an employee said it was a "shit show" (quoting from the article), there must be something going on over there. I can imagine that once the realization set in that Musk wouldn't be joining the board and would in fact just be continuing to criticize Twitter on the platform itself, this caused consternation and people began to wonder where he was planning to go with this.
I get the feeling Musk thinks Twitter is trading at a discount and the discount will increase. Imagine what will happen if they kick the bot armies off, or if they don’t…seems downhill either way. And suppression of conservative views is fueling subscriber emigration to other social media.
Can you imagine these people having to do anything that doesn’t require a laptop