Twitter Plans To Cut About 300 Jobs As Soon As This Week: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Twitter Inc. is planning widespread job cuts, to be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The company may cut about 8 percent of the workforce, or about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, the people said. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. An announcement about the job reductions may come before Twitter releases third-quarter earnings on Thursday, one of the people said. Twitter, which loses money, is trying to control spending as sales growth slows. The company recently hired bankers to explore a sale, but the companies that had expressed interest in bidding -- Salesforce.com Inc., The Walt Disney Co. and Alphabet Inc. -- later backed out from the process. Twitter's losses and 40 percent fall in its share price the past 12 months have made it more difficult for the company to pay its engineers with stock. That has made it harder for Twitter to compete for talent with giant rivals like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Reducing employee numbers would relieve some of this pressure.

Comments

8%

[Anonymous Coward]

If 300 people is 8% of the workforce, that means there are something like 3700 people working at Twitter. That seems pretty ridiculous. What in the world do those 3700 people do?

Re:8%

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit. If I had a goal, "I want to build Twitter, every feature, and I want it in 30 days" I can't conceive of needing more than 50 employees. That isn't just developers and UI people and sysadmins, it includes the janitors, HR people, a few accountants, the marketdroids, and enough suits to manage them all. Double the team to have it running at Twitter scale with an NOC manned 24x7. Double the team again for something I'm overlooking entirely, and then tell me what the heck those other 3,500 bodies are doing in chairs every day at Twitter HQ...

Re:8%

[Mashiki]

Obligatory XKCD reference

Here, let me fix that for you.

Re:8%

[AmiMoJo]

That comic deliberately mis-interprets and contradicts itself to make a point.

For example, it quotes Mill's comments on the necessity of protection against the "tyranny of prevailing opinion." However, that doesn't mean freedom from consequences, it means that anonymous speech must be possible and protected.

It mentions "liberty of circulation" and "access to infrastructure" for minority opinions. That doesn't mean that Twitter has to host your bullshit, it means that the government shouldn't ban you from using public roads to deliver your controversial newsletter. If Twitter were part of the government you might have a point, but it isn't. At most, you could argue for net neutrality giving everyone equal access to the network in order to host their own material.

You can also argue that public infrastructure should not be privately owned (WARNING: socialism!) because private companies are not the government. So it sounds like the comic is arguing that Twitter should be nationalised and run as a government service.

The last two panels argue that minority opinions should be considered. I agree, as does Mill. However, that doesn't extend to being require to give them a platform. The "responsibility" to extend free speech rights to others only goes as far as not not silencing them through the government (e.g. with laws), it doesn't mean you have erect a platform for them to speak from in your garden.

The cupboard of history

[Okian Warrior]

Twitter used to be free speech, but now it seems to be banning people right and left with the excuse "hate speech". In many cases the speech contains no insults whatsoever, and in many cases the speech is using clear terms in a non-insulting way to put forth a political view.

Google has several clear examples. For example, Scott Adams was banned from twitter for no apparent reason, and apparently gets banned from periscope [streaming app owned by twitter] whenever he starts talking about Trump.

Twitter is trying to engineer a "safe place" where no one can be insulted, and only approved speech is allowed.

It's bad enough that wikileaks threatened to start its own Twitter in response to the ban of Milo Yiannopoulos.

I think people are starting to realize that twitter's war on free speech makes it less interesting. When a celebrity with 9 million followers gets banned, that's 9 million customers who get put off and go somewhere else.

And I think that wikileaks will eventually be the answer. There's been no public announcement, but it's entirely possible that wikileaks *is* working on a twitter replacement, and of course it would be completely free speech.

By catering to the censors and thought police, twitter is digging its own grave and will get replaced by someone who's not afraid to stand up for free speech.

In a year or two, twitter will be on the cupboard of history, alongside companies (such as Google+) that restricted and pissed off its customers.

They won't take our money

[Anonymous Coward]

In my business, a small media in Brussels with around 100k monthly uniques, we allocated a 2017 budget for advertising and outreach; it's not a lot (1FTE and €50k), but it's by attracting many businesses like us that a tech company can be profitable. We've pretty much ruled out "traditional" web advertising because the returns are pretty small and our FTE has been experimenting with cross-posting our content on the social media platforms and paying small amounts for premium exposure.

With 30€, we find that we can increase our reach on Facebook by about 10x (from a baseline of 1000 followers), which increases visitors to our website by about 2k. LinkedIn is a close second. With twitter, we found that the same 30€ increases reach by 3x and brings in around 400 visitors.

We thought the discrepancy was so huge that we must be doing something wrong. Our social media guy tried to contact their local sales team in Brussels to get advice. They never answered. He called, they told him that they weren't going to talk to him unless he spent at least 5.000€.

By contrast, Facebook and Google have both sent representatives to give us classes on using their media tools... before we even hinted that we were thinking of spending money with them. We're going to allocate tens of thousands of Euros to each of them. It's not a lot, but it certainly was worth their time. And that's why their profitable and Twitter isn't.

So yeah, this doesn't surprise me one bit.