>Dough
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__
https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer
Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count
Inside Twitter 2.0, turmoil leaves employees stretched to the max
For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)
Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.
It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.
“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.
Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.
An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.
“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”
Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency.
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers.
“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The 8th floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.
“Most weeknights, they are fully booked,” another current employee said.
The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? “Sucks – and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”
Slack – once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything – has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.”
“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”
When Musk or the goons ask questions, employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer.
“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)
Despite the turmoil, remaining employees say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” has managed to improve on its predecessor in at least some ways.
“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”
The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”
At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”
With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other, overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.
“They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on,” one employee said.
Meanwhile, the recent wave of layoffs in the tech industry have contributed to a feeling of paralysis among those who remain at Twitter.
“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.
Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you regulators,’” we’re told.
The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says.
Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines, and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.
>White House communications director Kate Bedingfield to step down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bedingfield
>sword
>FBI Agents are currently at Mike Pence’s home to conduct a search for Classified Documents.
https://twitter.com/JPMacIsaac/status/1623690771365781504
Knowing that Hunter pressured a friend of his for the name of the bouncer that threw him out so he could have him killed, I am compelled to state the following.
If anything happens to me in the next few weeks, the Bidens are responsible.
>Lester Holt, Rachel Maddow and other NBC News, MSNBC stars absent from rank-and-file walkout
>Reddit confirmed it was the victim of a cyber attack, with hackers using a phishing attack on employees to steal login details and access the platform’s internal systems
Iran's intelligence ministry said on Friday it has arrested the "main actors" involved in a drone attack last month on a defense ministry site in central Isfahan province
India urges people to ditch 'western' Valentine's Day on Feb 14 and announces it is now Cow Hug Day
https://insiderpaper.com/moldova-gets-new-pro-european-prime-minister/
Moldova gets new pro-European Prime Minister
https://insiderpaper.com/t-mobile-usage-details-missing-or-not-available-issue-reported/
T-Mobile ‘usage details missing or not available’ issue reported
Multiple T-Mobile users are getting the ‘usage details missing or not available’ error. When customers select usage details, nothing appears.
T-Mobile is a wireless telecommunications provider based in the US. It provides voice, text, and data services to its customers through its extensive network of cell towers and fiber optic cables.
Reports of T-Mobile ‘usage details missing or not available’
Many users are frustrated by the issue and took to social media websites and community forums to express their concerns and search for a solution.
Some clients have also confirmed that their usage details do not appear at all, making it hard to keep record of their consumption.
“On the T-Mobile app, you have the option to see all usage regarding data usage, text messages sent/received & phone calls incoming/outgoing. It’s been about a week since my new billing cycle started yet my usage has not updated for this month to be able to see any of this information,” an affected user posted.
Another user posted: “I have chatted thru the app many times and on call. I have deleted and added the app with no change, logged on desktop, and no updates. The usage overview details on the current cycle do not update as of 24 Jan 2023. Overall shows an increase in calls and texts. But no updates on the details.”
Apparently, the issue is not new. It has been going on since many months and no action has been taken yet.
https://downdetector.com/
>there will be no children for them to teach
FBI agent Charles McGonigal's alleged corruption in Albania is tied to Hunter Biden!!
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Hunter and Albanian both worked for CEFC (Chinese oil firm)
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Hunter and McGonigal’s kids at same school
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Hunter got a $5mill contract
twitter.com/ReachMorpheuss/status/1622561965829722119
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1623108308902051841
This TikToker spends all day encouraging kids to push away from their parents. Teaches them that parents are bad, parents are evil.
Why? Because removing the parents is the first step for Groomers to exploit a child’s vulnerability and push them into Gender Affirming Care