Let me do a mini-askHN: I'm thinking of joining Twitter to work on their anti-abuse efforts. What factors should I consider in my decision?
At first consideration, this news doesn't worry me a ton. They provide a product that provides a lot of user value, just to a smaller user base than they/investors hoped. They've found a reasonable way to monetize it, with $2b+/year in revenue. Their expenses are too high for that, but not egregiously so, with previously committed stock compensation being a big chunk of things. There's still a lot they can do with the product. And they've got a unique value that's hard for other people to replicate: it's the place for public figures (public figures at all scales) to interact.
Am I crazy here? I know I'm taking a risk, but I'm not seeing more risk than, say, joining a Series A startup, which I've happily done before.
If you are sincerely interested in quashing abuse, and if the risk of being laid off does not frighten you, forget about the numbers and let’s talk about quashing abuse.
Twitter gets extremely mixed reviews from people who are the targets of abuse, and I believe I am putting that conservatively. So, what I would ask is not whether they are going to lay me off because they run out of money, but whether I am going to quit because when I get inside, I discover that they are not going to actually do much about it.
If Twitter has had a come-to-jesus moment about abuse, and there are no structural obstacles to doing something about abuse, this could be a job where you will one day look back and say, “I was part of the team that turned the corner on Twitter’s biggest problem. I made a difference.”
On the other hand, if Twitter doesn’t have quashing abuse in its cultural DNA, or if there are deep structural obstacles to quashing abuse, then you may discover that you cannot actually make a difference. That can be soul-crushing if you are passionate about the work.
I am not making a claim one way or the other about where Twitter is with this, I’m just suggesting that if you are motivated by making a difference, the biggest thing to figure out is whether you will actually be able to make a difference.
Wow, this is up there as one of the best responses I've read on HN.
Abuse is a huge problem at Twitter so being part of the team fixing it is a huge opportunity to "move the needle" as they say, and yet drama is historically a views/comment getter so some factions of the company might actually want to keep it around for its 'metrics'.
This is one of the biggest challenges at modern "web" companies, there is the outward facing position on a "problem" and then there some folks who are extracting value out of the problem so they only pay it lip service rather than work on it. Perhaps the canonical example was Tumblr's "porn" problem. It was a huge "problem" that Tumblr blogs were just image streams of contributed porn, and it was "great" that Tumblr was adding so many new blogs a month and getting so many unique visits Etc. So the metrics on which Tumblr was getting valued were being generated by content that was a problem, see the conflict? As a result any real efforts in engineering (according to stories, I don't know how true they are) at suppressing porn were quietly shelved.
So from an interviewing perspective, for a team that is going to address the "problem", you need to ascertain if the company wants a group which makes a lot of noise but doesn't change the status quo very much, or if the company wants to actually fix the problem. Depending on what kind of person you are, that will tell you if the opportunity is a good fit or not.
"Porn" problem, or porn "problem"? I find it hilarious that companies like Reddit or Imgur shun porn as beneath them yet the gigantic elephant in the room is that many, many, users come to their sites purely for porn.
Or for completeness "porn problem" :-) But you illustrate the point beautifully that there is the "story" about what a site is all about, and there are the "metrics" that show how successful a site is. And then there is the actual site usage by its users. Marketing would have you believe it is their "story" that is driving their "metrics" but they let the reader make that connection without saying it out loud. Gives them deniability later :-)
Thanks for mentioning this. You've hit the question I've been focusing on most. I've been a Twitter user for more than 10 years at this point, and for a long time they weren't as serious about abuse as I wanted. Not even close. But I think this time might be different.
I want to be careful to respect my NDA here, but I think I can fairly say that a) I was totally skeptical when I first started talking to them, and b) I now think there is a lot of reason for hope.
Private stuff aside, I think there are a couple of public reasons to think this may be the turning point. One is the enormous beating they've been taking in the press about this for the last year or so. The other is that their abuse problem was a big factor in them not getting offers from a couple of suitors during their attempt to sell themselves. I think it's safe to say their abuse problem cost investors literally billions of dollars. That is a pretty big learning opportunity.
"The other is that their abuse problem was a big factor in them not getting offers from a couple of suitors during their attempt to sell themselves. I think it's safe to say their abuse problem cost investors literally billions of dollars."
For me that's a huge red flashing neon sign that your efforts will be directed to what top management considers the problem to be and not necessarily what you consider the problem to be.
The reality of that situation they're looking to change the perceptions of potential buyers. That may or may not involve much that you care about. Of course they'll say the two overlap, but when push comes to shove...
Bear in mind that Twitter's most abusive users aren't going to say: "Thanks for kicking us out. We were wrong. You're right. Sorry." Instead, there's every reason to think that they will fight back in ways both expected and astonishing.
You could still prevail. But these kinds of spats can get incredibly personal. You'll want bosses that understand this is coming and can ride it out. People outside of work that have your back, too.
I think you're okay...Twitter reportedly didn't get acquired almost solely because of the abuse problem the buyer would inherit (e.g., Disney), and they now should have a crystal clear valuation for how much failing to address the abuse has cost. (Approximation: it is somewhere between $6B and $20B of added market cap.)
They haven't addressed abuse in the past because the market has stupidly hitched their stock price to MAUs, which I think has caused them to take their eye off the ball and prioritize that metric over all else. Address abuse, and risk lower MAUs.
So if they've finally decided that sacrificing MAUs in the short term is worth it (focusing instead on revenue, cost control, and cleaning up the toxic abuse), they may be able to finally realize some of that discounted value.
It sounds like it could be a great opportunity at helping Twitter unleash some of that discounted value. Not the sole reason that the value will be reflected in the future market price, but a very important factor that at least gives them an option to sell out later at a good valuation if the growth in earnings is slower than expected and they feel the need to test the waters again.
Worst case, it's 100% focus on stemming abuse, they clean it up in a year, and you're working for Disney, Microsoft, Google, Amazon or some other acquirer.
The big caveat with a company that historically failed at something is...are the people involved good enough to actually solve this problem this type around given the companies historical trend? Or does it make more sense to go to another social network where abuse has been a focus for a longer time and learn from people who have been successful so far?
Turning around a ship is really hard. I've made the mistake of working at a company with a hugely insurmountable problem (Bing) having viewed it as a big opportunity but I almost certainly pursued a job at the winner (Google) considering I had no experience as a professional engineer yet and would have learned much more. On the other hand if you already are the subject matter expert, it can be a huge opportunity to bring your skill set somewhere it is desperately needed.
Not that I really know first hand social networks that are great at solving the abuse problem but this is one way to look at a career choice.
Also, turning around an aircraft carrier (e.g. a public company with thousands of employees) is a whole hell of a lot harder than turning around a tugboat (private company) or a raft (a startup with 10 people in a room).
Advice to the OP: don't be a martyr. If it looks like you can make a difference, go for it! Just don't pin your identity or sense of self on whether you succeed. The markets are a harsh mistress.
This is a hugely important point. Allow me to back it up with a little story time.
I took a job a little over a year ago at a company that I knew was struggling financially, but saw opportunity for a lot of personal growth. To give you some idea of how dysfunctional this place is, it rates a 0 / 12 on the Joel Test. There's no scale for negative, otherwise it might be negative.
After more than a year of working here, I think I've managed to get us to .5 / 12. And that's been a battle.
The biggest factor? I completely underestimated the social aspect of it. I failed to realize that, in any dysfunctional organization, the people there are either extremely tolerant of that dysfunction, or worse, worked to create it.
As I sit here writing this, my co-worker is at his desk rewriting swathes of code that I had working. We're 6 weeks past our delivery date, he says it's fixed, but he's still over there swearing, so that can't be true. He hasn't committed anything to the repo in over a month, so I have no idea what he's done (or how valid his complaints are). When he was doing this a few weeks ago, he rewrote a lot of my stuff only for it to turn out to be a small mistake in his code that was causing things to fail. I don't mind having my stuff criticized or rewritten, but logic would dictate if you write a bunch of new code and merge it in with stuff that was working, there's probably an error in the new code, or possibly the mating with the existing base. Sort of a look to the log in your own eye before you cast out the mote in your brother's.
And that's just how things go here. Projects that should take a few months have dragged on for years (before I got here). Untested changes get pushed into products. Nothing is documented. Comments in code are usually snarky quips directed at the compiler provider or Microsoft and littered with curses. And there are a million other things.
It's like that because he wants it like that, it likely won't change, and I should probably just leave.
What are we even talking about here - "quashing abuse"? Are we talking about going to work deleting spam, statementless insults, etc., literally combating people abusing the platform? Or is it about stopping people abusing other people, deleting hateful comments, and maybe censoring certain ideologies (nazis, etc.)? I'm just wondering what abuse is, and what a twitter moderator's job description even is.
I imagine "abuse" is whatever the moderator in question defines it to be.
Look at Twitter's history of curbing "abuse" and you'll find that this nebulous definition gives plenty of room for their subconscious and conscious biases to take over--a disproportionate number of the targets of censorship on Twitter are of a certain political influence.
So I see no nobility in the original commenter's goal. Taking away the voice of people you don't agree with is not noble, and censorship of any kind is unfortunate.
I have a fairly fundamentalist view of free speech, so in my opinion the only reasonable standard where censorship would be an acceptable solution to any speech is either:
a) content that violates an individual or entity's privacy; or
b) direct incitement to physical harm to an individual, group or property; or
c) to protect the platform from legal damages or other legal quandaries
Unfortunately, most codes of conduct tend to be structured around public perception, which better serves a business' long-term interests over the "killer feature" of a truly open platform, which is seen by many as more trouble than it is worth, from the perspective of the platform owner.
> a disproportionate number of the targets of censorship on Twitter are of a certain political influence.
Yeah see I don't worry so much about this. I purposely follow people with whom I disagree (but who are well spoken) on Twitter to avoid ending up in an echo chamber. So I don't disagree with you about quashing diversity; the last thing I need in my life is to preach to the choir.
But the fact remains that, 1st Amendment or not, you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater and then plead "but, but, my rights!" to evade responsibility. Credible threats are assault (look it up, it's in every state's legal code). I would not be surprised if doxxing was found to fall under similar statutes by an enlightened judge if done with malice aforethought.
Furthermore, an individual's rights to free expression do not include a right to make Twitter spend money or lose opportunities due to their chosen expressions. Twitter != the government. If push comes to shove, their self-preservation must take precedence (legally, since they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders as a public company).
It's a chestnut, to be sure, but freedom of the press applies to those who own a printing press. Until and unless Twitter is nationalized (heaven forfend), they're restricted (at worst) by common carrier provisions. They can do a good job if it's in the best interests of their shareholders (and recent events suggest that may be the case). It's really an issue of how (how to maximize shareholder value, how to improve public perception, how not to drive away ads...).
Well, let me put it this way: banning people for threatening violence against other users in the name of social justice costs Twitter opportunities due to being unacceptable to a large chunk of the tech community (and I'm not even talking about them doing it to right-wing blowhards like Milo).
And yet, here you are on a platform that does not permit its users to threaten violence against other users.
Is that costing Hacker News "opportunities?" Compared to what? The opportunities afforded by not driving away all the users for whom threats of violence make a site toxic even if you aren't on the receiving end?
And what do you mean by a "large chunk of the tech community?" Do you mean a significant proportion relative to the "tech community?" Or a significant proportion relative to Twitter's user base as a whole?
And how do you define "the tech community?" Do you mean this cosy little echo chamber we inhabit made up of startup hackers and like-minded individuals? Or do you mean everyone working in tech, including the kinds of people working for BigCo who never go near Hacker News and visit Reddit for affinity subreddits like /r/volvo?
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All design decisions are tradeoffs. If you make one choice, you alienate a certain set of users. But if you make a different choice, you'll alienate another set of users while placating some of the first set.
So yes, there is some opportunity given up if Twitter goes around banning people who incite threats of violence (your example), but there is some other opportunity given up if it tolerates them.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Hacker News is not exactly terribly popular amongst the social justice part of the tech community. Also, users' opinions can only be influenced by threats of violence that they hear about, very few people who aren't in the immediate social circles of the offenders generally hear about these threats, and those are under social pressure to accept them for obvious reasons. Not banning people who haven't made threats of violence but whose opponents have tried to tie to unrelated people that have for political reasons has probably done far more damage to Twitter's acceptance amongst people who refuse to participate in communities where death threats are normal.
It's a small fraction of the tech community that has a problem with banning people for threatening others with violence. And the tech community is a small fraction of Twitter's userbase.
Not catering to the libertariat has never really harmed a mainstream-targeting business.
To define "abuse" we'll need to talk about expectations and norms around collective communication.
Social communication platforms (implicitly or explicitly) embody certain communication goals.
A. Striving for constructive conversation is one family of goals. These goals are valid even if fuzzy and imperfectly enforced.
B. Striving for "(almost) anything goes, up to legal limits, such as libel" is another kind of goal. This may seem safer and more ideologically comfortable to some. However, in practice, it still has large complexity and uncertainty.
Social media platforms are not necessarily responsible for promoting free speech in the same way that Democratic institutions are bound to protect individual rights. Many individuals have multiple channels for speech. They often can find a venue that works best for them.
Speaking generally -- there may be exceptions in specific cases -- organizations are not required to give every viewpoint equal airtime. Organizations are free to choose how they want to structure their environments, up to the point at which they accept money or are subject to the purview of governmental bodies.
Some people such the word "censorship" too loosely, in my view. Yes, governmental censorship is only justified with a very high and particular standard, subject to close scrutiny. However, private organizations are much freer to filter as they see fit, and I think this is justified. One church does not have to voice every viewpoint at a gathering. A magazine does not have to print every article submitted. Not every story gets to the top of Hacker News. The rules at play are, by definition, filters.
I want an online platform for constructive conversation. This requires some kind of norms and probably some kind of message "shaping" for lack of a better word. Call it filtering or summarization or topic modeling. Whatever it is, people have limited time, and to be effective, a platform has to design around that constraint. Platforms need to demonstrate excellent collective user interface design.
"Spam" is also a nebulous term. A million actual humans having a genuine conversation about their Nazi ideology isn't spam, in most people's definitions. But a million actual humans having that genuine conversation while at-mentioning me unequivocally makes it impossible for me to productively use Twitter the product - which is really the reason spam is bad.
And that applies to traditional spam too: if a bunch of fake Nigerian princes emailed each other and only each other, we wouldn't have a reason to get rid of it, as long as there was technical capacity to deliver those messages. The spam part is that it makes it hard for me to get the emails I want.
I might have a disagreement with Twitter's priorities if there are a million actual humans quietly discussing their Nazi ideologies in a corner and not bothering the rest of us, and Twitter prioritizes their quality of service over the rest of our quality of service. Other people might not, and that's fair. Other people might have a problem with it regardless of whether it impacts other people's service, and that's fair. But I think that such a scenario isn't what is commonly meant by "abuse".
> What are we even talking about here - "quashing abuse"?
Well, even if we don't agree on the full definition, we could start somewhere, specifically at the bottom of the barrel.
Harassment is an easy one: Death threats, threats of violence, unwanted contact with people in real life, unprompted sexual comments, threats of doxxing / swatting / hacking, relentless insults, a combination thereof etc, aren't really difficult to agree on. I don't think there's a convincing or defensible argument that someone has a right to follow someone around and bother them /directly/. Just improving this would be a massive improvement in many twitter users' lives, and twitter has been condemned many times for failing to take the simplest actions to prevent this.
Hateful ideologies discussed privately is quite different than that - I do think those still cause measurable harm and I'm against that personally, but at least I can understand why some people hold a free-speech slippery slope argument for not interfering.
Well that's part of the challenge, isn't it? What constitutes abuse?
The GP doesn't say that they're going to be a moderator, BTW. They might be a developer who would be building features that would allow each user to better determine for themselves how to manage abuse. Or tooling that would allow moderators to do a better job of managing abuse complaints.
The native feature set is pretty simple right now. A lot of people use Tweetbot for its temporary mute feature, which is not native to Twitter.
I can't imagine there is anything other than a sliding scale at work here. It's difficult to come up with hard and fast, absolute rules.
But there seem to be some easy wins - there is an increasing trend of Jewish users being on the receiving end of tweets suggesting that they belong in an oven. I've seen some tweets showing than when the user reports said tweet, Twitter replies saying that there has been no rule violation and that the user won't be suspended.
Working out a better policy for outright hate speech like that seems like a good start.
> Twitter gets extremely mixed reviews from people who are the targets of abuse
That's (as you note) putting it very lightly. It's basically unusable as a public platform if you're moderately famous. Go watch Jimmie Kimmel's bit with celebrities reading mean tweets on youtube and imagine being on the receiving end of it. The ability to lock down your account misses the point, though it does say that Twitter thinks abuse might possibly be a problem (as does comments by its CEO).
Screening out abusive users is a hard problem that hasn't been properly solved yet, anywhere in the world. An eternal September, to revive the phrase. G+/Youtube and Facebook's real name policy hasn't managed to solve it, and Facebook is only able to screen out the worst - gore and pornography, with devolving political discussions leading to many unfriendings this election season. Maybe not quite abuse, but still unpleasant.
If fighting abuse is your life's mission, then join Twitter. See what they're doing about abuse, talk to people who have tried to fight abuse for years, find out what's succeeded, what's failed. There may be some Twitter org-specific implementation barriers, but that's still a learning experience for the future. If you find some Twitter org-specific barriers that are insurmountable, get out.
My bias, here, isn't that I work for Twitter (I don't) but I doubt Twitter's inability to quash abuse has anything to do with corporate governance (other than an inability to spend infinite amounts of money on an infinite amount of moderators).
Humans are still currently the best at understanding humans, and we still do a terrible job sometimes. Computers aren't able to parse sarcasm, idioms, or subtlety, and being fed in plain text instead of speech makes it even harder as there's no vocal tone to analyze either. Twitter's 140 character limit hurts quite a bit here.
I agree that making a difference is key, but the problem itself also has to be considered - the early teething pains at Twitter in reaching "webscale" have been fixed by now (when was the last time you saw the fail whale?), but "people can be assholes to each other" is probably the oldest problem in the world.
Comparing abuse on Twitter and other platforms is like comparing Mt. Everest with Twin Peaks.
On Facebook and most other social networks, at least the subject of harassment can at least block the perpetrator, and refuse to friend an alt account. Since the primary use case for Twitter is to have public tweets and open replies/mentions, blocking a user making death threats won't solve the problem; they will just open a new account and flame you from there. On Youtube, there is less reason to look at the comments; a celebrity can focus on the number of views as a metric for success.
The reach of abusers on Twitter is far greater than on other networks. Add to that a lack of defined communities, as in Reddit, Facebook Groups, and other message boards: there are no community moderators on Twitter to react to harassment and the posting of personal information.
I see the handling of abuse on Twitter as a hard problem that will take a mix of pattern-matching algorithms for brigade detection, machine learning on tweet sentiment and content (doxxing, death threats, other TOS violations), and least scaleably, a large pool of tier 1 support staff to act on recommendations to ban users.
It's baffling that they don't require email, or better yet, phone verification before allowing you to tweet. That one simple change would make it a lot harder to spin up alts. On second thought, it's not baffling. I'm sure they're worried it would hurt their user growth numbers.
I'm sure their only meaningful metrics for acquisition is ad impression growth, revenue growth, and cost control. Active users is headline-grabbing but unless it translates to revenue, it's secondary.
How is that harmful to the original poster? They don't see it.
Seems adequate, especially when defining a universally accepted definition of "abuse" that isn't just censorship-as-abuse itself is such a hard problem..
Quashing abuse means preventing people from creating dozens of throwaway accounts. Preventing people from creating dozens of throwaway accounts would immediately eliminate any growth in Twitter's userbase - it would kill one of Twitter's primary statistics.
It seems like you are in the stage of your career where you are mostly making decisions based on who you want to work with and what interests you. So, if this meets those criteria, you should do it. That being said:
A) I think you underestimate how out of wack their expenses are. There is a decent chance that larger cuts will come in the next 12 months.
B) Additional cuts, along with internal management turmoil, are likely to effect your day to day job there to some degree. Are you comfortable with your manager changing? With the composition of your team changing? Are you the kind of person that just rolls with this sort of thing or will you find it frustrating as it impedes your ability to plan and execute? If I were you, I'd be asking myself these sorts of questions.
Admittedly I work in a remote office and not in HQ, but I've noticed NO day-to-day changes. The work, the management, the atmosphere have all been remarkably consistent despite wild rumors and general craziness.
I can't speak to the financials, but this...
> Additional cuts, along with internal management turmoil, are likely to effect your day to day job there to some degree.
...is false (in my, and every employee I've spoken to about this, opinion).
I'm not saying you shouldn't consider these points, but if you turn down Twitter expressly because you imagine the madhouse inside, I'm here to report no such thing.
I see that you are a very young employee in a remote office. As such you are more likely than average to be cut in future layoffs. Depending on your financial situation you should possibly be looking for a new job already. You should definitely start looking for a new job when you hit your year cliff next March. It would be a significant career mistake not to.
It takes a few years, but once you're no longer a growth company and the lay offs start up, the company because a less interesting, more stressful place to work. And the best people stop wanting to work there. (See Yahoo, Aol, etc). What's going to happen now is twitter is going to try and trim down their own projects to siphon as much profit as they can from them, and then try to grow by acquisition instead of innovation...
So what? This is happened to every successful startup in existence. A company can't be a startup forever. What it needs to find is a niche which can continue churning out successful products even when the majority of employees are concentrated in the range of 35-50. This is what Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm do and they're still largely profitable companies.
Hi, Harry! (We met at a Scala unconference a while back.) You are a person who knows from turmoil, so I take this advice seriously.
You're correct about my motivations; this is a problem I want to work on. After a career in startups I'm more comfortable with turmoil than most, but you're right ability to keep delivering user improvements is very important to me. I suppose the question I have to struggle with is how much this crunch will force positive change versus pathological contraction-cycle chaos. I've seen organizations do both, and from the outside it's hard to guess which one will win out.
(Yes I remember meeting you. I hope you're doing well!)
I agree that it's hard to guess how things will go. Predictions are hard, especially about the future. Overall I think that if you go into it with open eyes and are comfortable with the fact that things might not work out the way you hope (but they might!) then it's probably the right thing to do for you. I think you'll get to work on pretty interesting stuff that's very important to the company right now. And if things get too weird/annoying you can always go work somewhere else.
In addition to the other fine points, I'd point out that "anti-abuse" is going to be "not revenue generating". I wouldn't expect that team to be very stable.
The temptation is probably to try to rationalize how obviously important it is, but that's true of everything in the business so it carries no weight. It's not revenue generating. You don't need to convince me it's revenue generating, you need to convince management, who will be looking at a revenue sheet at the time and seeing negative numbers from that department. It may be shortsighted but companies looking at significant chances of failure in the short term get shortsighted. They have to.
That said, as you suggest, the worst case scenario is that you join and then you lose the job, and then you're back to not having a job. If you can tolerate that financially, then it may still be a good risk. But please be sure you can tolerate that financially.
> In addition to the other fine points, I'd point out that "anti-abuse" is going to be "not revenue generating". I wouldn't expect that team to be very stable.
Yep.
The best piece of career advice I ever got was to work in departments that are profit centers, not cost centers.
I've seen the dynamic play out several times: the employees in the profit centers are treated well, and the employees in the cost centers frequently need to justify the existence of their department and their jobs when management decides to cut costs. It's pretty clear who has the better job security and job satisfaction.
I think that depends. Abuse and harassment was mentioned as a major factor that kept the company from selling in the past several months. If upper management isn't willing to give up the possibility of selling, fighting abuse would be an important goal, whether or not it's a cost center.
That's not a given, and I agree with braythwayt above that assessing the company's commitment is the most important consideration, but there are strategic reasons they could prioritize it.
Sorry, but... yes, that's a great example of the sort of rationalization one is tempted to do.
Here's the business reality: On the balance sheet for the abuse team, there are only expenditures. The benefits don't show up on the balance sheet there; there are diffuse, spread throughout the company, and often future-biased (the abuse shut down today may prevent people from leaving next month). It's the same for IT at a bank, customer support staff anywhere, or accountants. No matter how important it may be, it's not revenue generating. And that makes a huge difference in future career prospects. Things that may impact revenue in a year is not important to a company becoming concerned it may not make it to that year.
(In Twitter's case, while there will probably be a business entity called Twitter in a year, the thing that might not make it to next year is Twitter-the-unicorn-dream. Going into maintenance mode or being acquired at unfavorable terms, while better than going out of business entirely, is still a failure for the Twitter of today.)
I say this as someone who is not really directly revenue generating myself; I'm moving ever more into risk mitigation and management. But the company I'm doing it in is not currently contracting and laying off, but growing. I've got my eye on my own situation, too.
That's a twist on the kind of quarter-by-quarter thinking that leads companies like Twitter to optimize for the short term (protect the MAUs!) and neglect the work that has to be done for long term growth and value.
Not disagreeing with the point that being employed in a cost center of a struggling company has risk. You always would prefer to be at the competitive edge if you can, and in a role that aligns with the company's main mission. I just suspect that in this case, the recent abandonment of Twitter buyout offers due to the abuse problem has now made curtailing abuse a top priority, and a much more important part of the company's ability to deliver value.
Another example would be a company whistling past the graveyard with respect to security, seeing security as a non-revenue-generating cost center. All it takes to wake up the board to its importance is a major breach that affects the market cap. (Or take quality control in companies that deal with life-and-death systems.)
Security is actually the specific risk-mitigation regime I've been moving into, and that's part of why I'm not too worried about it as a career move. It seems to be able to pay well, which suggests that the corporate world does have some understanding that it is a necessity and not just a cost center. But only some.
It's an excellent point. My theory here, like
hyperpape, is that recent events have shown Twitter the user growth and stock valuation impacts of abuse, so the connection to metrics they care about will have been learned well enough to avoid the bias that traditional accounting introduces here. (I say that in contrast to things like the Lean Manufacturing or Beyond Budgeting approaches to business accounting, which are not as vulnerable to this error.)
But yeah, it's still definitely a risk. As a long-time startup person, I'm more practiced than most at dealing with financial risk, but I appreciate you mentioning it.
Recent events have shown Twitter the user growth and stock valuation impacts of news articles about their abuse problem. You know what makes for bad news coverage? Banning people journalists know. Some of whom really love harassing people who disagree with them, and threatening them with violence, and really blatantly lying about them, and setting their followers on them, and all through it insisting that anyone who thinks there's anything wrong with this is supporting harassment. Oh, and said group of people are decidedly white, those they go after often rather less so, the former get to define what they're doing as fighting racism, and I'm sure you can guess what happens when someone who isn't white disagrees.
Basically, if you read the end of 1984 and always wished your boot could be the one stomping on a human face forever - especially if it was a black woman's face - then this could be the career for you. Otherwise, run away.
Thanks everybody for your advice. I've carefully read all of it.
And since no less than three people have privately cautioned me about taking advice from HN, let me just say that one of the things I love/hate about HN is that we here are very good at poking holes in ideas.
As somebody who has been a daily Twitter user for years, and as somebody who worked on anti-abuse stuff in the early days of web community sites, I'm super excited about possibly helping solve Twitter's abuse problem. Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global public square, and I truly believe that dialog is necessary for us to solve our biggest problems. I would love to make Twitter a hospitable place for many more voices.
So my goal here was not to take the median HN position as gospel, but just to see what concerns people raised. (I could also have asked on Twitter, but there's a bit of selection bias there.) And indeed, many useful concerns were mentioned. So thanks, all!
I spent five years on the YouTube anti-abuse team. You should also apply there. And where I am now, Square. And Stripe, and Facebook… there are lots of good anti-abuse teams in the industry.
This is pretty standard because it is a quick and dirty proxy to those who have most the internal experience. Sometimes companies will layoff people who are more senior because of cost, but the reality is most senior people are not making double of those who just joined. A 20% difference in pay simply is not enough to take on the risk accidentally getting rid of people who have key knowledge.
I didn't know that was common sense but it's something I have personally experienced.
I joined the IT team at a major food industry, and I would look at the office floor and people would point me to those who also had just joined.
Things started to go sour an year later (cash related), and people slowly started to leave. On my last day, I looked at the office space again and something seemed interesting: everybody working had been at that company for 3+ years. All the newcomers had left. I mentioned this to a couple of people and asked them "do you see anyone here that has joined in the last 2-3 years?" and the answer was "Crap, no".
So it's not only management letting go of the last hires, but these hires also leaving (more of that, I suppose).
This is indeed a general rule, but there are oddball cases, like when the firm I was at was acquired and the new owners kept all the back-office staff, but laid-off the developers (the acquisition was for the customer base, not the technology).
Which raises an interesting question - what's the valuable parts of Twitter? Customer base, for sure. Architecture for scalable messaging, absolutely. The rest of it? Not sure.
I'd argue that Twitter's brand is among its most valuable assets. It's globally known. Used and promoted by influencers like celebrities, artists, politicians, media, business leaders, activists. It's all over music, TV, media of all types. Heck, an entire movie was made about it.
That sort of broad public awareness is very hard for any company to get.
Keep your eye out for abuse from intelligence operations and the State Department.
Twitter has been waging a 'battle' against National Security folks for some time with regard to giving them carte blanche ability to pull censorship triggers.
I guess to distill that down: if you care about that sort of thing, also consider the ethical quandries your career may put you in.
Probably remaining Twitter employees at work; in the past, it's been pretty obvious on here that some of my posts have gotten mass downvoted by specific cohorts.
The smartest friends that I have that (used to) work there have all already left and moved onto other unicorns. That's generally a bad sign, whenever all the smart people leave.
as a former employee who had the opportunity to sit across the table from some of the execs you read about in the newspapers, let me give you my admittedly skewed perspective.
cop catches thieves.But it is not in the interest of cops if they catch ALL thieves. This is not a vaccination program, where if you eliminate polio across the nation, doctors will rejoice because they can now focus on malaria. If there are no thieves at all, the funding for cops will simply drop drastically & cops will be laid off.
So cops must catch thieves, and always "appear" to catch even more, but never actually catch all of them.
If you had a 100% sanitized feed with no trolls and no spam and no abuse, it would become a plain old communication utility, like a letters to the newspaper column, or weather channel or stock ticker driven finance channel etc. Even in those mediums, the channel programmers throw in sordid details like "most disastrous tornado", "worst all-time hurricane", "sleaziest hedge fund manager" etc. They do that because otherwise it gets too boring and viewership drops.
it is very much in the interest of twitter to "appear" to be actively engaged in combating trolls and abuse. but part of its newsworthiness and charm is all this frenzied action around policing abuse and suspending high profile trolls. these things keep the company hip and happening. if you solve the problem for good, there wouldn't be much to cheer about - users may temporarily cheer, but then they'd notice nothing much happening, no controversy, no abuse, no trolls, everything too polite, and soon users will switch to the next racy medium.
The notion that Twitter needs drama about Twitter is interesting, but at first blush I don't think I agree. Most of the drama I see in my feed is about everything else in the world, from global events to small, individual actions. If abuse ends, people will still have plenty to be dramatic about.
If Twitter is a reliable communication channel, that strikes me as very good for business. For years, the telephone was an extremely reliable communication channel, so much so that we still talk about "dialtone" as a metaphor for something that just works. But it was insanely profitable. People fell in love and ranted about things via their perfectly boring Western Electric phones and were happy to have them just work.
I also don't think "reliable" has much to do with "polite". People can be rude without being abusive, and vice versa. Some of my favorite people are shockingly, colorfully rude, but they are never vicious. Think of a good stand-up act as an example: many comedians get a lot of emotional power from being impolite. But that's very different than, say, picking on an audience member in an attempt to drive them out of the theater.
So in this case, I think Twitter and its users all benefit from energetically reducing harassment, death threats, etc. One way to look at it is the venue for a party. At a party, humans provide plenty of entertainment on their own; you don't need a kitchen fire to have a lively and exciting time.
Yeah. Abuse is a problem for high profile people for the most part, who are an infinitesimal fraction of the user base. For the average Joe with a few hundred followers it really isn't much of an issue. And for the most part public figures continue to use Twitter, despite their grumbling.
From my perspective it doesn't seem like much of a risk--no more than any other job, and probably less than most.
Even if Twitter flames out and gets sold, it's a highly recognizable name, and will be from a long time. It's a name that jumps off the page of a resume. It will help you get through HR filters for a long time to come.
And particularly in the anti-abuse space, going to work at Twitter has to be like going to play in the major leagues.
As long as Twitter's business model is based on revenue growth, you will be interfered whenever your anti-abuse efforts mean interrupting the user growth. All those alt-right bots that popped up during the US election add up nicely to the amount of active users, which result in more advertising revenue. Take that in account and check if your ethics align with that.
I'd be worried if it was a part of Twitter that wasn't the main product. There's a whole load of things they're doing that don't seem related, and that's probably where the cuts are going to be.
Your thing seems safe enough. In any case, you'll be in SF, so not a huge problem finding other work if it goes sour.
> I'm thinking of joining Twitter to work on their anti-abuse efforts.
The abuse issue on their platform is the main issue with most potential buyers. I would imagine by now they have their core services running on auto pilot (minus SAN failures).
For one, if you can help fix the abuse problem, you would be helping out a lot of people. It sounds like interesting work, I know there are lots of great people at Twitter and if you think you can grow there, I see little downside.
At the same time, I wouldn't get too comfortable...
The only bit I'd be worried about (and I am prone to these kind of worries, not claiming this is particularly rational) is that "anti-abuse" might not sound revenue generating to a senior manager with a bean-counting perspective.
I believe Twitter to be an important platform; it's basically become our global public square. But abuse is limiting the depth and richness of the conversation by suppressing speech and driving people off of Twitter. I did anti-abuse work in the early days of web communities and it's something I care about a lot.
So the upside for me is the possibility that I can look back in 3-5 years and say, "Wow, our team made a big difference to a lot of Twitter users. They are now participating in ways that weren't safe for them before."
I expect that would also have significant positive impact on Twitter as a business. More users and more conversation benefit them, as does maintaining their position as a unique medium for connection. But personally, I'm mainly motivated by impact. As Tron says, "I fight for the users."
That did cross my mind, but I couldn't really ask it anonymously. Indeed, 20 minutes after posting, I got a kind and funny Twitter DM from the hiring manager offering to discuss any concerns people here raised.
Based on my experience with the people there, I figured they wouldn't mind. You can't really work at Twitter without believing deeply in honest public dialog as a way to solve problems. Indeed, I heard about the job through a retweet and I responded publicly, so for me this has always been public.
And it's provided some unexpected benefits. I've already received some great emails from people, including encouraging ones from within Twitter and from people I respect who might want to join me in solving the problem.
If Twitter's approach was to can him for asking reasonable questions (even on a public forum) before taking the job, that would be a signal that the opportunity wasn't worth pursuing for me.
My guess is, your down votes relate to your implicit equation of abuse to politics - as though saying statements that politically disagree with you are abuse.
I would say be very worried about layoffs .. Your job will be to program a spell-checker for bad words - At which time your usefulness has ended. Mr. Snowden shows the government is very interested in collecting information on posters. Therefore your next assignment would be identify and write an exit routine to report them. End the end you will be found useless. Because powerful interests like abuse - so the spell-checker dies and the exit grows in very direction.
"Anti-abuse" in practice is revenue-negative; regardless of whether you think it's a good moral position, kicking people with tons of followers off the platform for starting inter-celebrity drama (or sometimes for no clear reason at all) reduces platform engagement.
If they really wanted to, they could provide cost-free tooling that would let people prevent seeing "abusive" tweets (email spam prevention is a solved problem after all), but putting humans in the loop is done so they can decide at a whim the spectrum of acceptable opinion (try merely insulting a Saudi-affiliated account & see how quickly you get banned, now that the KSA owns more of them than Jack does).
So given that they're losing money & the position is revenue-negative, the scenarios are:
- Bought by Google or somesuch, which has their own robust content filtering teams, making you redundant
- Bought by hedge fund as a moneymaking venture, making you redundant
"The move could hurt the companies image in San Francisco where the competition for engineers is fierce."
I live in New York and I would never work there. Why would anyone want to join a sinking ship? It's image is gone all in the name of the mighty stock price.
Well, to extend the ship analogy: Twitter seems to believe that they're sinking because the ship is overloaded, so they're trying to improve things by tossing people overboard. I don't mean to make light of the situation; I truly feel for all of the people affected by this.
So, why would anyone want to join Twitter now? Well, the diminished share price could be one reason. If you believe the company can turn things around, and you believe that your contributions would help the company do so, then getting in now and hopefully acquiring some shares or options at the current market price could be a rational move. You'd probably want to make sure you've got a lifejacket (i.e. an emergency fund) handy just in case you find yourself thrown overboard in the future.
Also, working at a company which actually has a deployed product with a high public profile is probably not bad. There are plenty of startups which never pan out. And there are plenty of companies out there with a single profitable cash cow and futile strategic projects searching for the next hit. Or barely running but business critical legacy projects written in Cobol, C++ or Java. Twitter doesn't strike me as particularly bad in comparison.
Also, having had layoffs is not necessarily only a bad thing. Even the best company will end up with a certain amount of substandard, undermotivated employees after a long hiring frenzy. The best thing for everyone is to let them go and hopefully blossom elsewhere.
Being able to say "I worked for Twitter" is and will be impressive to most people regardless of Twitter's future. It's not like future employers will see that on a resume think you're the one who sunk the ship (unless you do something high profile to make your negative impact public knowledge).
Twitter isn't sinking. It just isn't ascending as fast as investors would like to ensure hyper growth.
While its always great for your career to be in a company that's constantly growing - sometimes being that person that can help the company do a lot more with less resources is even better for your career.
When everyone's jumping ship - the people who choose to stay on-board can often be very rewarded as far as their career growth goes.
Having half the guys around you laid off [or about to be] is not what I would call "ticking along comfortably".
Twitter is not a 100 000 people company where there's a 300 people division being restructured. It's a major management failure that needs at least 50% of lay off. At this scale, it will reflect to the entire environment and all the employees.
1. Not lean enough. That's why today's news bumped their share price.
2. Not great at leveraging value into revenue. That's what an acquirer would do, ostensibly.
Plus, the specifics of the Disney/Google rumors are of dubious veracity. Don't put too much, er, stock into them.
You could argue that they've hit peak audience and that might be fair. A change in leadership would probably push Twitter into becoming a more aggressive on the acquisition front itself, too. Basically, a lot of untapped value and too much overhead.
I'm not up on the Bay Area hiring scene these days, but I would guess that the people that would never work there, wouldn't have before the layoffs.
The big companies use stock as a major component of their compensation package, so the stock price being down already was impacting their ability to hire in comparison to their peer companies. By cutting staff and beating revenue estimates they might be able to raise their stock price which may keep some of their existing engineers from jumping ship.
But I'd agree, Twitter does not look like a great long term prospect for ones career.
Twitter certainly has problems but they have nothing to do with any sort of unhealthy pursuit of the mighty stock price. They have to do with poor management, lackluster growth & inflated expenses.
Reuters leading with "Twitter beats revenue estimates..." while the Wall Street Journal chose "Twitter to Cut 9% of Workforce as Revenue Growth Slows" [1]. This is usually a sign of a political fragmentation, e.g. within management, within the Board, between the former or within the shareholder base.
(Reuters' correspondent is based in Bangalore; the Journal's in the Bay Area [2]. Neither contains any direct quotes. Journal cites multiple Wall Street analyst reports.)
Meanwhile, TechCrunch led with "Twitter lays off 9% of its workforce as it posts a desperately-needed positive Q3," [1] a clear and obvious sign that there is a shareholder struggle within Aol, TechCrunch's parent, and that ultimately they decided to split the difference to avoid the website shutting down. I point to my magic slippers as evidence supporting this fact.
My belief, sadly held, is that this is just the 2nd step of a Yahoo-scale transition. It won't be the user numbers that get them, it will be the ads side. Twitter is going to get a shrinking piece of the ad budget, especially as new entrants arrive. Which new entrants you ask? Snapchat, for one. Pinterest is heating up as well.
As long as they carve out a niche as the source of live news and comments and other products (FB / Instagram / Snapchat / etc) don't eat that space they can be successful. But they seem destined to be a niche product at best.
> Twitter Inc's quarterly revenue growth slowed sharply in the third quarter but topped analysts' expectations, and the company said it would cut 9 percent of its global workforce.
> Revenue rose about 8 percent to $616 million, above the average analyst estimate of $605.8 million. The company reported a 20 percent rise in revenue in the previous quarter and 58 percent last year.
> Twitter had 3,860 employees globally as of June. The layoff could hurt the company's image in San Francisco, where the competition for engineering talent is fierce.
Total revenue of $616M and 3,860 employees (pre-layoff) means they've got $159K of revenue per employee. If the majority of their work force is engineers that's pretty weak. After adding in health insurance, 401k, real estate (for office locations), and all the rest of the usual expenditures, it's no wonder they can't turn a profit.
> "We're getting more disciplined about how we invest in the business, and we set a company goal of driving toward GAAP profitability in 2017," said Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto.
They're going to need go significantly deeper than 9% to get to profitability.
EDIT: Per the replies the revenue numbers quoted are per-quarter, not annual. Still begs the question of how they hell they're not profitable making $636K per employee.
> Remember that it is quarterly revenue. That gives an average revenue of %636K per year per employee, which does not sound that bad.
Oh wow I totally missed that. I thought it was annualized.
Okay that changes my question to, "How the hell can you not turn a profit making $636K per employee?!". As in how seriously inefficient and overpaid is this company?
THey are paying $170M in stock based compensation this quarter. That is in addition to salaries. These costs add up fast. No wonder lay offs are needed. If I were them, I would target people who are stock compensated very high to start lowering those costs. That said, Adam Bain and Anthony Noto are each paid $70M/yr in stock compensation [1] - so you have that.
They're offered a lot of stock because they're worth something to the company. Same goes for new grad engineers pulling tons of income in stock. It's possibly a bad strategy for a tech company to start firing the people it values most.
One of my concerns with Twitter is that I think their usage is going to drop considerably after the election is over. I say this only because half of Twitter mentions in the press related to Trump tweets.
That's a very good question. Amazon has gone through similar periods where the thesis to not invest has almost always been "they don't make any money" (something that would have cost you roughly a 25x gain since 2008). The hate seems to happen when a) there's a disjunction between market cap and a traditional reading of the balance sheet, b) that difference is due to some poorly understood measure of value that isn't directly captured in traditional financial metrics, c) people either don't see the strategy or are comparing apples to oranges but thinking they're comparing apples to apples.
Mostly it seems to be comparing Twitter's numbers with Facebook's, and assuming there is 100% overlap between the two companies in terms of niche. This could be an error of putting Twitter in the wrong category. Maybe they should be compared to media companies, not social networks? Maybe by those measures they are doing just fine?
> "Amazon has gone through similar periods where the thesis to not invest has almost always been "they don't make any money""
Amazon didn't make money because they had tremendous capital expenditures but they had amazing cashflow and revenues. Twitter has none of these. There is no comparison at all.
> "Mostly it seems to be comparing Twitter's numbers with Facebook's, and assuming there is 100% overlap between the two companies in terms of niche."
Totally false, the criticism is that Twitter has turned away from what made them unique and tried to do things like Facebook. All the while Facebook stole their good ideas while Twitter sat on them doing nothing.
I don't know if it's bias I've seen. A lot of talk about how no one was going to buy them for what they wanted (which turned out to be true) and a sense that the product has peaked which could very well be true if competitors eat into their use case.
They spend about 2.5 billion dollars to make 2 billion dollars. Not a great business model. If they can do more cuts and bring the expenses way down and seriously turn around the product, they will have a good future. I almost feel, they need somebody like Eric Schmidt to manage the company while Jack learns and focuses on the product.
A question for those with far more management experience than me at large companies - why cut 9%? Is it really twitter's management view that they are only slightly over staffed? Do they think that their employees are going to believe this is the last cut?
9% seems like a large enough number to destroy moral, but too small to make any material differences to the cost base.
There are a lot of people in this discussion who know more than I do about Twitter - and part of the answer is situational specific.
Often, "cut fast and deep" makes sense because you're in a difficult situation where both expenses and time are against you. People use all sorts of analogies (e.g. "cutting the fat") but the reality is that if you take out 20-30% of your workforce you will cut back needed functions and you will lose people who are both good and whom you need: there simply won't be enough time, insight or structural ability not to make some mistakes. There tends to be a big impact on morale for a long time after the event - improving morale becomes a major management objective. The upside of this approach is you do it once, it's a big shock internally but then everyone can focus back around the mission.
The alternative approach is a more gradual deflation of your numbers, closing down teams and not-backfilling roles. If you have time then the upsides of this approach are that you can be much more surgical about the changes. Presented in the right way it's going to feel more like a "pivot" with some natural wastage of people that won't work in the new mission. The downside - is that it can feel like a "long march" as successive sets of cuts are made.
Pick your poison as it's both the framework and the implementation!
I don't know why they specifically chose 9% but I can say that substantial redundancies at a large corporation are horribly complex for both legal and logistical reasons.
Reasons why they might have chosen a number of this magnitude?
10-15% annual attrition for a large corporation is fairly normal i.e. losing that sort of experience spread around an organisation isn't particularly challenging (although you would normally backfill some/all). You wouldn't have to do some massive re-org just for this reason (there might be other reasons to do one of course).
In many jurisdictions there are different rules for layoffs over a certain size. So they may be choosing to trigger rules in some areas and not others. Occasionally I have seen companies choosing to "overcut" in a particular jurisdiction in order to take the legal pain once rather than drip feed pain over a long period.
It may also be that they can cut or sell specific areas so that pervasive impact is limited. This might produce a number that's larger or smaller than needed for cost purposes but helps to control the morale issues as many people see no direct impact.
Edit: another very popular reaons is that that's the number that the analysts are expecting. I didn't say it's a good reason, just a common one.
There are plenty of other reasons for ending up with a number up to and including "ip dip sky blue" that I have seen over the years. Generally though, it's tricky and often unpleasant.
Though, Twitter would need to make the layoffs random, force co-workers to escort the laid off off premises, and take away perks for a few weeks... If that's what they were angling for.
From the perspective of the 10% that remain, why would they bother to stay if 90% were cut? Sounds like taking on ten times the day to day workload. In SF, it's not like they couldn't go elsewhere for work.
I would cut 90% of the people and cancel lots and lots of projects.
The people that remain would be well compensated. If you can cut 90% of the workforce and still preserve half the revenue (and that might not be possible), then you can pay each person $1 million per year.
Really though, I just have a hard time understanding what three thousand people are doing to keep Twitter running day after day. I keep coming back to thinking about how Instagram had 15 people working there when Facebook bought them.
At first consideration, this news doesn't worry me a ton. They provide a product that provides a lot of user value, just to a smaller user base than they/investors hoped. They've found a reasonable way to monetize it, with $2b+/year in revenue. Their expenses are too high for that, but not egregiously so, with previously committed stock compensation being a big chunk of things. There's still a lot they can do with the product. And they've got a unique value that's hard for other people to replicate: it's the place for public figures (public figures at all scales) to interact.
Am I crazy here? I know I'm taking a risk, but I'm not seeing more risk than, say, joining a Series A startup, which I've happily done before.