The difference is plain to me, one is an identifier of white supremacists and another is a term used to abuse and degrade others.
Pepes are a sign of shitty people, they’re not themselves used to denigrate and directly dehumanize.
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Working at a what?
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I certainly don’t like hearing that a bunch of people are going to be losing their jobs; but I think what drives my “Why did Twitter even have that many employees to cut???” attitude is the degree to which Twitter doesn’t seem to be turning the people it has to any visibly productive activity.
Some of their background technical work deserves a fair bit of respect: they started out with some seriously unscalable systems and have since done a fair amount of ripping out and rebuilding in order to accommodate much more traffic at relatively low cost. It’s not the sort of message-passing interface that HPC or algorithmic trading would be interested in; but providing adequately fast, adequately reliable, delivery of a whole lot of messages at suitably low cost per message isn’t a trivial exercise; and they’ve done a lot of work on it.
Aside from that, though, they just seem to be drifting. Occasionally they shuffle the deck chairs or do something to piss off mobile app developers; but aside from that they mostly act like a mature company that just continues to produce product; except that they have never managed to turn a profit by doing so.
If they are out of ideas; they have a lot of employees to just be treading water and doing incremental maintenance. If they aren’t out of ideas; they sure don’t seem to have anything to show for it.
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Okay, please tell me I’m not the only one…
Does anyone else see what I see?
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I am not sure what you are seeing? I looked for typos…
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Put it this way. It was very small on my screen, and on first glance, I did not see “SCIED.”
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Why do you use twitter, @beschizza? This is a serious question.
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I think you underestimate how much work running a service used worldwide by hundreds of million of people takes.
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Right, I don’t really care if there are horrors there or if the horrors are allowed to remain in their festering corner of it. I just don’t want to have to be stymied in my efforts to avoid them by the service itself. Twitter won’t do the easy options (
mute all accounts with less than 100 followers) for reasons–it presumably doesn’t want to mess with the social graph it has and what remains of its growth – so the scope of what it will consider ends up so thin it generates technical difficulty and never quite happens.
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And even 4chan decided that there were limits, which lead to claims that it had become authoritarian and censorship happy.
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Alternate Headline: Twitter reduces staff to 140 characters.
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It’s (kinda) funny, in that the twitter API (at least last time I looked…) allowed for that sort of filtering. I recall grabbing tweets (and their metadata) associated with a given hashtag and being able to specify the minimum number of followers an account needed to have for my search to grab their posts. So presumably the method exists, they just can’t be bothered to make it an option for regular users…
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fantastic reply.
hopefully they didn’t fire them by just tweeting #You’reFired to the group.
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I guess I still don’t get it. It was a bit hard to read though. Here is the full image on the web page.
Quit possibly, but I am willing to bet that there is some fat to trim as well.
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I’m working about half a mile from them at a tech company as I type this. I suspect, based on decades in the industry, that folks here are underestimating the necessary people to run a service, develop for it, run its offices, do its marketing and PR, legal, etc. Twitter has never seemed grossly oversized for what it is as a company. If anything, it is rather small. How many people work for Facebook? Tens of thousands?
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Maybe this is apples and oranges, but the operations and datacenter team that runs Wikipedia and associated properties has less than 25 people, and the whole foundation has about 250 people on staff.
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Comparing Twitter and Wikipedia is apples and oranges. FWIW, Wikipedia has a very large staff keeping things going, but they’re mostly unpaid volunteers.
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I used to edit a fair bit in the early days. Now that I don’t have the time, I make annual donations. I don’t look at it as charity. WP is a valuable resource I use, so contributing financially to keep the lights on is just enlightened self-interest.
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I’m a software developer. I was shocked to find Twitter had more than 30 employees.
Or Facebook, for that matter.
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