Existing equity was converted to cash at $54.20/share, but will still be paid out on the existing vesting schedule. It's a carrot, insofar as it is promised future money, but it's a decaying carrot.
Edit:
Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.
> Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well?
I have no idea about Facebook. I barely even use it so all my information is second-hand.
> Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section?
We're not, at least not intentionally. Do you think we are? If so, why?
The Trending section is still biased towards things that are being talked about frequently. Unfortunately, that means outrage-inducing topics will tend to bubble up there. We're working on making trend identification more sophisticated in order to provide better context, but it's a really hard problem with such short snippets of context.
> Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative?
"Political engagement" overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, "outrage engagement". Outrage engagement is a net negative; political engagement that does not devolve into misinformation and toxicity is not. We are actively trying to decrease engagement with misinformation and outrage, but it's a hard problem. Also, frankly, it's being hampered by a lack of focus internally that is leaving the teams involved with no clear direction other than "do something, now!".
Non-toxic political engagement is a net positive for us. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by shutting it all down, assuming we even could (it's fundamentally the same problem, though a little bit easier). I see how other people might see that as the better option to shut down the toxicity and misinformation, though.
This is a popular sentiment on HN, but it oversimplifies the situation. Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does. Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales.
Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on. Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations.
Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform. Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads).
I suspect there are some here who won't believe this; a few may be tempted to throw out a certain pithy Upton Sinclair quote. I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.
It hasn't been until recently. We are currently locking down all internal systems based on the minimum necessary accesses for various systems. We should have done this a lot sooner.
> The problem is that companies want the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions
No, we really don't. In fact, we have mechanisms in place to keep ads away from certain categories of content. Do you have any evidence to support your statement?
> Just a week ago, Twitter lost over 20% market cap because they noticed that they were showing people device-personalized ads even though they were opted out of that. After they fixed it, revenues went down.
I'd like to clarify what actually happened here (throwaway for paranoia).
The actual bug was that the account signups flow was accidentally modified to automatically opt out new signups[1]. When Legal reviewed the ads targeting and discovered the opt out setting wasn't being respected, they made ads start doing so. Two this later they discovered the sign-ups bug.
[1] I know, a bunch of people would rather it was always like that.
Edit:
Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.