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They've likely been kicked off an individual server. Switching to another server with different terms of service is simple enough. Or, you could roll your own server. I mean, I think you can pay $5 a month for your own server host. Cheaper than Twitter blue.

That doesn't mean you'll get seen by everyone (different servers can ban access to other servers), but it's nearly impossible to be totally banned.
Maybe I'm missing something, but does this mean that Stormfront could pay for its own server and publish all the hate speech it wants? Obviously they would be blocked by other servers, but that seems like a really good deal for Stormfront since they'd be banned completely from most centrally-run networks.

Edit: There's no way this is how Mastodon works, right? As much I would love to see an open-source service that lets anybody say whatever they want and if you don't like you just block them, such a site would immediately become Silk Road 2.0 or worse. I'm surely misunderstanding how this service works.
I don't know if there is an overarching ToS that "Mastodon" uses or if there's a survey to be filled out to determine "proper use" or not. I'd be shocked if they did. It's an open source SM installation...think of the original LINUX when it first came out. Of course, they have to have their own machines, own domain, own way to service email addresses etc.
 
They've likely been kicked off an individual server. Switching to another server with different terms of service is simple enough. Or, you could roll your own server. I mean, I think you can pay $5 a month for your own server host. Cheaper than Twitter blue.

That doesn't mean you'll get seen by everyone (different servers can ban access to other servers), but it's nearly impossible to be totally banned.
Maybe I'm missing something, but does this mean that Stormfront could pay for its own server and publish all the hate speech it wants? Obviously they would be blocked by other servers, but that seems like a really good deal for Stormfront since they'd be banned completely from most centrally-run networks.

Edit: There's no way this is how Mastodon works, right? As much I would love to see an open-source service that lets anybody say whatever they want and if you don't like you just block them, such a site would immediately become Silk Road 2.0 or worse. I'm surely misunderstanding how this service works.
Yup. They could. Other servers would likely block them so their members can't see Stormfront member posts. But they'd have a space where members of that server can discuss whatever they want.

It's decentralized. No central entity blocks servers. Individual server admins do.

Edit: Users can also mute/block other users and won't see their posts.
 
There is the possibility Musk is keeping the 20 percent who are doing 80 percent of the work. This is not his first rodeo. I would expect Twitter to come out of this with a leaner meaner organization and probably hirer 1000 new employees who are more aligned and motivated with what Musk wants. Twitter is more talked about than ever and has more traffic than ever.
Great. It also has a lot less advertising than ever.
The advertisers need to quit listening to the advocacy groups.
Yea I’m sure they all want their product ads right under a post that says “actually nazis are good” with 25,000 likes.
Lol....because that is what happens....good god..

Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s not true
 
How hard can it be to create a Twitter clone? If someone really believes there's an opportunity here - that Twitter is going down - wouldn't there be multiple well-funded competitors out there already? Didn't Parler and Truth Social already do this? I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out Mastadon a week or so ago and don't understand why anyone is suggesting it as an alternative to Twitter. It is incomprehensible to me.
I imagine it's trivially easy to create a Twitter clone. The problem is with the user base. Parler and Truth Social both failed to replace Twitter because while Twitter isn't a digital utopia, nobody wants to leave a pretty-good site for one that is obviously going to turn into a one-sided circus. When Musk bought Twitter, what he was really buying was Twitter's existing population of users.
 
How hard can it be to create a Twitter clone? If someone really believes there's an opportunity here - that Twitter is going down - wouldn't there be multiple well-funded competitors out there already? Didn't Parler and Truth Social already do this? I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out Mastadon a week or so ago and don't understand why anyone is suggesting it as an alternative to Twitter. It is incomprehensible to me.
I believe the creator of Waze has been working on one. Post, I think it's called.
 
How hard can it be to create a Twitter clone? If someone really believes there's an opportunity here - that Twitter is going down - wouldn't there be multiple well-funded competitors out there already? Didn't Parler and Truth Social already do this? I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out Mastadon a week or so ago and don't understand why anyone is suggesting it as an alternative to Twitter. It is incomprehensible to me.
I believe the creator of Waze has been working on one. Post, I think it's called.
The thing Twitter does (could be did after their purge) is run such a thing at scale. It's very easy to create something similar. Scaling it is difficult. It's why Twitter's fail whale was so present early on.

And then there's the larger problem: social sites succeed because they get a critical mass of users.

Google Plus was a superior social platform back in the day in many ways. But they never achieved a critical mass of users that made the overall content experience better than the early social sites. They had some regional success outside the US, but never cracked the US market.
 
There is the possibility Musk is keeping the 20 percent who are doing 80 percent of the work. This is not his first rodeo. I would expect Twitter to come out of this with a leaner meaner organization and probably hirer 1000 new employees who are more aligned and motivated with what Musk wants. Twitter is more talked about than ever and has more traffic than ever.
Great. It also has a lot less advertising than ever.
The advertisers need to quit listening to the advocacy groups.
Yea I’m sure they all want their product ads right under a post that says “actually nazis are good” with 25,000 likes.
Lol....because that is what happens....good god..

Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s not true
If my math is right, they'll need 104,000 users at $8/month to pay for an entire year to make up that one $10M account.
 
How hard can it be to create a Twitter clone? If someone really believes there's an opportunity here - that Twitter is going down - wouldn't there be multiple well-funded competitors out there already? Didn't Parler and Truth Social already do this? I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out Mastadon a week or so ago and don't understand why anyone is suggesting it as an alternative to Twitter. It is incomprehensible to me.

I've wondered that too @CletiusMaximus I know next to nothing about it but my thought on it is the structure isn't that terribly hard to create. It's building the audience.

It works because the audience is there and that attracts creators to write the content. And it becomes a virtuous circle of more audience attracts more and better creators and that brings in more audience and up it goes. And of course, it can also work the other way if people / creators leave. We'll see.

But to me, that's the biggest challenge in the business - creating an audience.
 
I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out Mastadon a week or so ago and don't understand why anyone is suggesting it as an alternative to Twitter. It is incomprehensible to me.

I've not used Mastodon at all other than registering my accounts, but I've heard several people say the same thing in it's difficult to figure out.

That's part of the beauty of good products like Twitter and Slack and others. Even people without great tech skills can easily use it effectively.
 
There is the possibility Musk is keeping the 20 percent who are doing 80 percent of the work. This is not his first rodeo. I would expect Twitter to come out of this with a leaner meaner organization and probably hirer 1000 new employees who are more aligned and motivated with what Musk wants. Twitter is more talked about than ever and has more traffic than ever.
Great. It also has a lot less advertising than ever.
The advertisers need to quit listening to the advocacy groups.
Yea I’m sure they all want their product ads right under a post that says “actually nazis are good” with 25,000 likes.
Lol....because that is what happens....good god..

Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s not true

I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything? There is some chaos right now, but Musk is intentionally cleaning house and purging employees. In the short term, some advertisers will bail. But people are still using it at record amounts. Musk is not concerned with short term revenues. He is attempting to reinvent their business model and culture. The anti-Muskers are attempting to judge his rebuild based on the first week of training camp. Let Musk draft his players and setup his offensive and defensive schemes before concluding what a massive failure he is. He has a track record which suggests he knows a thing or two about success.
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Actually, he may be doing the exact opposite:


My question is why didn't Twitter take child exploitation seriously before?
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
When the popular opinion and official orthodoxy says the world is flat, claiming it is round is a 'lie'. Many lies people were banned for, are facts today. When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth', the free speech game is history.
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
When the popular opinion and official orthodoxy says the world is flat, claiming it is round is a 'lie'. Many lies people were banned for, are facts today. When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth', the free speech game is history.
What happened to? It's a private company. They can gatekeep whatever they want just like musk can now. Do whatever you want cuz he now owns the private company
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
When the popular opinion and official orthodoxy says the world is flat, claiming it is round is a 'lie'. Many lies people were banned for, are facts today. When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth', the free speech game is history.
What happened to? It's a private company. They can gatekeep whatever they want just like musk can now. Do whatever you want cuz he now owns the private company

That is not the vision of science, America, or Musk. Twitter is a public forum that should be open to all kinds of diverse views. That is the optimal solution for progress.
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
When the popular opinion and official orthodoxy says the world is flat, claiming it is round is a 'lie'. Many lies people were banned for, are facts today. When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth', the free speech game is history.
What happened to? It's a private company. They can gatekeep whatever they want just like musk can now. Do whatever you want cuz he now owns the private company

That is not the vision of science, America, or Musk. Twitter is a public forum that should be open to all kinds of diverse views. That is the optimal solution for progress.
Musk will have to moderate his site just like the previous regime did. A unique, unforseen scenario will certainly arise and the time will come. When he does he or whoever makes the decisions will get dumped on.
 
Laid-off employees at Twitter’s Africa headquarters are accusing Twitter of “deliberately and recklessly flouting the laws of Ghana” and trying to “silence and intimidate” them after they were fired.

The team has hired a lawyer and sent a letter to the company demanding it comply with the West African nation’s labor laws, provide them with additional severance pay and other relevant benefits, in line with what other Twitter employees will receive

 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
When the popular opinion and official orthodoxy says the world is flat, claiming it is round is a 'lie'. Many lies people were banned for, are facts today. When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth', the free speech game is history.
What happened to? It's a private company. They can gatekeep whatever they want just like musk can now. Do whatever you want cuz he now owns the private company

That is not the vision of science, America, or Musk. Twitter is a public forum that should be open to all kinds of diverse views. That is the optimal solution for progress.
Musk will have to moderate his site just like the previous regime did. A unique, unforseen scenario will certainly arise and the time will come. When he does he or whoever makes the decisions will get dumped on.

No he does not. Denying intelligent people with viewpoints which appeal to a sizeable part of the population is not how 'Musk will have to moderate his site.' I really don't see how a platform justifies denying a highly educated and extremely articulate person the right to express his views.
 
I believe their reason, but what does that have to do with anything?
Because his everything is allowed approach and alleged cutdown of moderation staff has now allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric. The algo is defined to place ads around popular posts. Some of the worst posts are the most popular.

Now will he find a way to change that going forward? I guess we’ll see but for now advertisers are bailing in droves.

Free speech does not mean everything is allowed. Trolling, harassing, abuse, exploitation and many other things that can be moderated. The Free Speech which is essential to a free society is the ability to express dissenting opinions on popular ideas. The ability to face dissent is how we grow as a society.
Dissenting opinions sure..... flat out lies no
When the popular opinion and official orthodoxy says the world is flat, claiming it is round is a 'lie'. Many lies people were banned for, are facts today. When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth', the free speech game is history.
What happened to? It's a private company. They can gatekeep whatever they want just like musk can now. Do whatever you want cuz he now owns the private company

That is not the vision of science, America, or Musk. Twitter is a public forum that should be open to all kinds of diverse views. That is the optimal solution for progress.
Musk will have to moderate his site just like the previous regime did. A unique, unforseen scenario will certainly arise and the time will come. When he does he or whoever makes the decisions will get dumped on.

No he does not. Denying intelligent people with viewpoints which appeal to a sizeable part of the population is not how 'Musk will have to moderate his site.' I really don't see how a platform justifies denying a highly educated and extremely articulate person the right to express his views.
We will see. Many of Twitter's previous bannings were far more complex than how you described here.

His decision to unban folks by a poll is pretty funny though I have to say.
 
Lol: Musk didn’t specify the kinds of engineers or sales roles Twitter was hiring for, and the company doesn’t currently have any open roles listed on its website.
 
Jason Fried is a writer and business owner. He runs 37 signals that make the product we use at Footballguys - Basecamp. He writes a lot about business.

He's a pretty common sense bootstrap business sort of owner. They don't do lots of debt or venture capital.

Thought this was interesting regarding company size and number of employees.


On company size​

I have no idea how the the Musk-era Twitter saga plays out. That's a time will tell situation.

And this isn't a post about Elon, his personality, his management style, decisions being made, talent drain, morale at the company, or the thousands of people who've been laid off or outright quit. There's plenty to be said there, and plenty of people are saying it — many on Twitter, no less.

But I do want to comment on one point.

There's this prevailing, anchoring notion that a company that had about 8000 or so people a few weeks ago must have close to that many — or even half that many — to run effectively. I don't believe what you had has anything to do with what you need.

I know this from personal experience. I've run a company for 23 years that has been competing directly with massive companies for many of those years. And while all those companies think they need that many people to run their operations and support their business, I know you can do a whole lot with a whole lot less. And not just do, but do just as well — or better.

Every company has different priorities of course, but let's examine a few things.

With the information I was able to find online...

  • Monday has about 1500 employees.
  • Asana has about 1600 employees.
  • Clickup has about 1000 employees.
  • Slack has about 2500 employees.
  • Smartsheet has about 3000 employees.

These companies compete directly with my company, 37signals. Each of these companies has somewhere between 100-150k paying customers. Give or take a few ten thousand. And thousands more free users too.

Guess what? We do too. We're right in that ballpark as well. None of these companies, us included, have an order of magnitude more customers than the other. Of course none of this is apples-to-apples, as every company is different, but we're still talking fruit. This isn't apples-to-chickens. We all offer similar kinds of products that do similar-enough things for purpose of comparison. Revenues and profits may be different, but that's a matter of business model, not the number of people served, or the quality of service.

And how many employees do we have at 37signals? Around 80 (which is the most we've ever had). And are they working ridiculous all-nighters or weekends to make up for the significantly smaller team? No — we all work about 40 hours a week.

What's our uptime? Exceptional.

How's our customer service? Friendly, quick, and thorough.

How do our customers feel about our products? Here's what 1000 have to say about Basecamp, for example.

Similar story for HEY. On top of that, we also maintain two previous versions of Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack for thousands of customers who remain on earlier versions or older products.

Building complex, large organizations is a choice, not a requirement. We chose differently. Other companies might as well.

So it's absolutely possible to run a tight ship, deliver outstanding products, offer the highest level of customer service, and have exceptional uptime with a small, focused, high-quality crew working reasonable hours while living in a dozen different cities around the world.

As for Twitter, I don't know what the right number is — and it's really not a number, it's about distribution and concentration. If you had 8000 people at Twitter, and they were all in sales, Twitter would be in trouble. So you obviously have to have the right people in the right places doing the right jobs, but thousands upon thousands is not a requirement simply because there were thousands upon thousands before.

And I'm obviously not comparing the complexity of running a service like Twitter with Basecamp or HEY, but I do think it's very fair to compare Monday and Asana and Clickup and Slack, among others, to Basecamp and HEY. And we're able to service around the same number of customers, and actually generate more profit than all of them combined (since they're losing hundreds of millions annually, between them).

Small is not less than. It's an advantage.

-Jason
 
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Jason Fried is a writer and business owner. He runs 37 signals that make the product we use at Footballguys - Basecamp. He writes a lot about business.

Thought this was interesting.


On company size​

I have no idea how the the Musk-era Twitter saga plays out. That's a time will tell situation.

And this isn't a post about Elon, his personality, his management style, decisions being made, talent drain, morale at the company, or the thousands of people who've been laid off or outright quit. There's plenty to be said there, and plenty of people are saying it — many on Twitter, no less.

But I do want to comment on one point.

There's this prevailing, anchoring notion that a company that had about 8000 or so people a few weeks ago must have close to that many — or even half that many — to run effectively. I don't believe what you had has anything to do with what you need.

I know this from personal experience. I've run a company for 23 years that has been competing directly with massive companies for many of those years. And while all those companies think they need that many people to run their operations and support their business, I know you can do a whole lot with a whole lot less. And not just do, but do just as well — or better.

Every company has different priorities of course, but let's examine a few things.

With the information I was able to find online...

  • Monday has about 1500 employees.
  • Asana has about 1600 employees.
  • Clickup has about 1000 employees.
  • Slack has about 2500 employees.
  • Smartsheet has about 3000 employees.

These companies compete directly with my company, 37signals. Each of these companies has somewhere between 100-150k paying customers. Give or take a few ten thousand. And thousands more free users too.

Guess what? We do too. We're right in that ballpark as well. None of these companies, us included, have an order of magnitude more customers than the other. Of course none of this is apples-to-apples, as every company is different, but we're still talking fruit. This isn't apples-to-chickens. We all offer similar kinds of products that do similar-enough things for purpose of comparison. Revenues and profits may be different, but that's a matter of business model, not the number of people served, or the quality of service.

And how many employees do we have at 37signals? Around 80 (which is the most we've ever had). And are they working ridiculous all-nighters or weekends to make up for the significantly smaller team? No — we all work about 40 hours a week.

What's our uptime? Exceptional.

How's our customer service? Friendly, quick, and thorough.

How do our customers feel about our products? Here's what 1000 have to say about Basecamp, for example.

Similar story for HEY. On top of that, we also maintain two previous versions of Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack for thousands of customers who remain on earlier versions or older products.

Building complex, large organizations is a choice, not a requirement. We chose differently. Other companies might as well.

So it's absolutely possible to run a tight ship, deliver outstanding products, offer the highest level of customer service, and have exceptional uptime with a small, focused, high-quality crew working reasonable hours while living in a dozen different cities around the world.

As for Twitter, I don't know what the right number is — and it's really not a number, it's about distribution and concentration. If you had 8000 people at Twitter, and they were all in sales, Twitter would be in trouble. So you obviously have to have the right people in the right places doing the right jobs, but thousands upon thousands is not a requirement simply because there were thousands upon thousands before.

And I'm obviously not comparing the complexity of running a service like Twitter with Basecamp or HEY, but I do think it's very fair to compare Monday and Asana and Clickup and Slack, among others, to Basecamp and HEY. And we're able to service around the same number of customers, and actually generate more profit than all of them combined (since they're losing hundreds of millions annually, between them).

Small is not less than. It's an advantage.

-Jason
Interesting and if Musk can take the limited staff and make it profitable, major props to him. Not sure if that's very good for humanity in general but would be impressive business.
 
Was this in reference to something I'd said earlier? Could you point me to that please? Thanks.
Nothing specific, I'm just asking... what would it take for you to think this was going badly? And what would it take for you to think Musk had failed at Twitter? Is there anything you could see that would convince you of either thing?
 
Jason Fried is a writer and business owner. He runs 37 signals that make the product we use at Footballguys - Basecamp. He writes a lot about business.

He's a pretty common sense bootstrap business sort of owner. They don't do lots of debt or venture capital.

Thought this was interesting regarding company size and number of employees.


On company size​

I have no idea how the the Musk-era Twitter saga plays out. That's a time will tell situation.

And this isn't a post about Elon, his personality, his management style, decisions being made, talent drain, morale at the company, or the thousands of people who've been laid off or outright quit. There's plenty to be said there, and plenty of people are saying it — many on Twitter, no less.

But I do want to comment on one point.

There's this prevailing, anchoring notion that a company that had about 8000 or so people a few weeks ago must have close to that many — or even half that many — to run effectively. I don't believe what you had has anything to do with what you need.

I know this from personal experience. I've run a company for 23 years that has been competing directly with massive companies for many of those years. And while all those companies think they need that many people to run their operations and support their business, I know you can do a whole lot with a whole lot less. And not just do, but do just as well — or better.

Every company has different priorities of course, but let's examine a few things.

With the information I was able to find online...

  • Monday has about 1500 employees.
  • Asana has about 1600 employees.
  • Clickup has about 1000 employees.
  • Slack has about 2500 employees.
  • Smartsheet has about 3000 employees.

These companies compete directly with my company, 37signals. Each of these companies has somewhere between 100-150k paying customers. Give or take a few ten thousand. And thousands more free users too.

Guess what? We do too. We're right in that ballpark as well. None of these companies, us included, have an order of magnitude more customers than the other. Of course none of this is apples-to-apples, as every company is different, but we're still talking fruit. This isn't apples-to-chickens. We all offer similar kinds of products that do similar-enough things for purpose of comparison. Revenues and profits may be different, but that's a matter of business model, not the number of people served, or the quality of service.

And how many employees do we have at 37signals? Around 80 (which is the most we've ever had). And are they working ridiculous all-nighters or weekends to make up for the significantly smaller team? No — we all work about 40 hours a week.

What's our uptime? Exceptional.

How's our customer service? Friendly, quick, and thorough.

How do our customers feel about our products? Here's what 1000 have to say about Basecamp, for example.

Similar story for HEY. On top of that, we also maintain two previous versions of Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack for thousands of customers who remain on earlier versions or older products.

Building complex, large organizations is a choice, not a requirement. We chose differently. Other companies might as well.

So it's absolutely possible to run a tight ship, deliver outstanding products, offer the highest level of customer service, and have exceptional uptime with a small, focused, high-quality crew working reasonable hours while living in a dozen different cities around the world.

As for Twitter, I don't know what the right number is — and it's really not a number, it's about distribution and concentration. If you had 8000 people at Twitter, and they were all in sales, Twitter would be in trouble. So you obviously have to have the right people in the right places doing the right jobs, but thousands upon thousands is not a requirement simply because there were thousands upon thousands before.

And I'm obviously not comparing the complexity of running a service like Twitter with Basecamp or HEY, but I do think it's very fair to compare Monday and Asana and Clickup and Slack, among others, to Basecamp and HEY. And we're able to service around the same number of customers, and actually generate more profit than all of them combined (since they're losing hundreds of millions annually, between them).

Small is not less than. It's an advantage.

-Jason
It's interesting he focused on size. The other three things that differentiates 37 signals:

1. They were very early adopters of work from anywhere

2. They don't expect people to work more than 40 hours. I bet they've never had a code review at midnight on a Friday where devs had to print code :)

3. They create project management software

The first two allow them to attract high quality employees. I bet they are extremely selective when hiring because they can be. So they get more productive employees. The last means they are likely more strategic and plan very well. So they're not wasting employees' time on low-value projects. And also hold employees accountable because of their project management chops. It's a well run company.

Employee-friendly and highly strategic businesses are always going to outperform those who aren't. Especially those that just want to perfect a simple product instead of be everything to everyone (ie App X).
 
I'm just asking... what would it take for you to think this was going badly? And what would it take for you to think Musk had failed at Twitter? Is there anything you could see that would convince you of either thing?

:confused: Of course. Lots of things could go badly. If the site was down as many feared (myself included) with so many less people than they'd had, that's pretty bad. Twitter used to have this problem quite a bit in the past.

Or if the product started to change significantly for the worse.

Or if there was less good relevant content.

From what I could see personally, the product looked exactly the same this week (excellent) as it had before Musk.

For what it would take to deem musk a failure at Twitter, that probably would take a bit longer to be fair. But of course, that's entirely possible. Again, it would be the obvious things.

Do you think it's possible Musk could fail at Twitter?
 
Not speaking for 80s and I'm not saying musk didn't need to cut jobs but I'd rather have 2 people employed working 40ish hours each than 1 working 80ish in general

Sure. Even if the costs to the employer were roughly the same, paying 2 people for 40 hours a week vs 1 person for 80 hours a week, I think it's healthier to keep work weeks around 40.

But it's a balance. And it depends on how much work there really is to do. And I have no idea of how much manpower is actually needed to make Twitter run.
 
Lol: Musk didn’t specify the kinds of engineers or sales roles Twitter was hiring for, and the company doesn’t currently have any open roles listed on its website.

From the link, it looks like he is floating the idea of stock options as an incentive to employees. But where would he set the strike price?
 
I (and my co-workers) are much more productive in the office. It's not really close.

We are trying to develop a physical product. My office has a workshop where I can mock up prototypes and a lab where I can test them. I also need my co-workers available to review them - I'm talking about manufacturing, quality, product marketing, brand marketing, senior management, etc. My marketing team likes to WFH (for obvious reasons) but if I need them to review a potential change, doing it over Teams sucks.

There are some folks on my team that WFH and it makes no difference to me - purchasing and finance, for example. I know it can work, just not for me.

Obviously, if you are'not working on a physical product, YMMV.
I'm in the same line of work as you are, but I only go in once or twice per week at most. I'm not doing the lab testing anymore. I'm not running the CNC machine. I'm not assembling the prototypes. I'm not soldering the circuit boards. I used to do those things but now I supervise those that do. My people are in 3-4x per week because they need to do those things. I only review their work and I can review prototypes and samples from my house. Heck I had samples sent to me in Mexico when I was living there.
Sure efficiency might be a bit lower and the lack of spontaneous ideas and creativity can suffer a bit, but there's no way I'm asking my people to come in 5 days a week if I don't want to do it. I already ask them to be on phone calls with China at least once per week in their evening.

I too used to want to make a name for myself. Now, I just want to make good products that people like. And I want to do it alongside people that don't hate doing the work.
 
When you anoint someone as the gatekeeper of the 'truth'
What if someone purchases that title?

That is the exact opposite of what Musk did.

I'm not sure you know what the word "opposite" means.
I understand perfectly. You are intentionally misinterpreting my point. Musk has no interest in acting as a gatekeeper of the truth, he destroyed the wannabe gatekeepers when he axed most of the employees.
 
I (and my co-workers) are much more productive in the office. It's not really close.

We are trying to develop a physical product. My office has a workshop where I can mock up prototypes and a lab where I can test them. I also need my co-workers available to review them - I'm talking about manufacturing, quality, product marketing, brand marketing, senior management, etc. My marketing team likes to WFH (for obvious reasons) but if I need them to review a potential change, doing it over Teams sucks.

There are some folks on my team that WFH and it makes no difference to me - purchasing and finance, for example. I know it can work, just not for me.

Obviously, if you are'not working on a physical product, YMMV.
I'm in the same line of work as you are, but I only go in once or twice per week at most. I'm not doing the lab testing anymore. I'm not running the CNC machine. I'm not assembling the prototypes. I'm not soldering the circuit boards. I used to do those things but now I supervise those that do. My people are in 3-4x per week because they need to do those things. I only review their work and I can review prototypes and samples from my house. Heck I had samples sent to me in Mexico when I was living there.
Sure efficiency might be a bit lower and the lack of spontaneous ideas and creativity can suffer a bit, but there's no way I'm asking my people to come in 5 days a week if I don't want to do it. I already ask them to be on phone calls with China at least once per week in their evening.

I too used to want to make a name for myself. Now, I just want to make good products that people like. And I want to do it alongside people that don't hate doing the work.
I wish I was in that position. I was in that role until senior management decided China could do everything and therefore my team was no longer necessary. After they layed my team off, we learned that China actually can't do everything, but we cant afford to hire anyone, so here we are :kicksrock:

You guys hiring?
 
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