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Comment by GSimon | Hacker News Reader

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are running, people will be able to post 240 chars of content and some rich media images, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech

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Well ok sure, but then I can't imagine that the cuts Musk has done would accurately get rid of the bloat and not just a random selection of 80% of their employees. If you were one of the 20% of people doing actual work, why the hell would you stay if the only future promise is working longer hours and "being more hardcore"? Frankly I'd only agree to that if I was already doing nothing, because zero multiplied by anything is still zero. If you already are doing your job and the company asks you to work even more than before, then get your severance and go.

There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.

Elon said "At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense."

But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.

> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there

This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.

The problem is he's getting rid of the solid workforce and keeping the bloat. No decent engineer would work 80 hours a week in the office over 40 in the home.

A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users.

If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.

A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.

That's one thing I fully believe Musk on. Twitter is the hottest news in the industry right now. There's no better place to read about it than Twitter itself. Thing of it is... most of the traffic I've seen is rubberneckers. He can only crash his gigayacht so many times before it's no longer a spectacle.

Advertising is basically their whole business, right? Technically I guess most companies can employ fewer people and do less of their core business but that isn’t a great trajectory to be on…

For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?

By shifting moderation responsibilities to the individual mods on each subreddit. Reddit employees do very little moderation on their own - mostly reviewing entire subreddits once they get reported enough times - and banning them entirely if they are unsavoury enough. They basically outsourced it to volunteers in exchange for a platform to have your community on(interestingly, Discord works in the exact same way - discord employees only review servers once they get bad enough and ban them, general reports go to server mods and only to them)

Reddit effectively farms out moderation to volunteers. It's a lot like feudalism. Subreddit mods put in the labor of the day to day moderation of the sub in exchange for the ability to wield power over the subreddit. When a subreddit is shirking in it's moderation duties, or otherwise doing something the central power doesn't like the subreddit is deleted.

Reddit has something like over 20,000 unpaid mods that are active daily

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