I did not consciously consider that all corporations have life cycles, and software-service companies tend to be shorter-lived than most. I just assumed that Twitter would be around forever.
But something smelled about it. No business plan for profitability, high feature churn, deliberate anti-features in line with random-reward reinforcement. I created an account solely to see how much spam it was going to get, and whether the password would eventually be leaked. I didn't use the account at all. I didn't use Twitter, by their standards: when someone elsewhere said i should go look at somethng on Twitter, I didn't log in, I didn't use an application. I fired up a web browser and went to look. No posting, no replying, no retweeting (what a ridiculous and insidious mechanism!) and no following of anything or anyone. This is not a bad experience, as it turns out, but not a compelling one, either. The evidence from that suggests things that anyone who has thought about these things from a user's perspective could tell you: a user wants to see posts from the people they specifically signed up to follow, all the posts, in chronological order, with easy searching which can be limited to a particular poster. People like subcommunities where they can choose to read all the posts from the people also in those subcommunities. Hashtags are a terrible implementation of this, because humans are not good at tagging. Threading (in the original Usenet sense) is highly valuable. Personal kill filters are necessary. And on, and on -- it seems like every social media experiment is doomed to rediscover these things.
Once I found a Twitter stream that I thought I would be actually interested in long-term, so I found a way to get an RSS feed from it. Turns out that if you're not involved in Twitter, reading disconnected tweets is not a good experience.
I wonder if being involved in Twitter would actually improve that. I suspect not.
So. Twitter. In an impossible imaginary universe where a CEO can know everything about all of their employees and can effortlessly pick out the lesser performers , it is still highly unlikely that a 50% layoff results in the company surviving. At a minimum, a working company needs to be able to talk to and pay suppliers, do accounting and payroll, operate the service, acquire money, and operate infrastructure. No matter how much Twitter automated, they must have lost enough institutional knowledge that wasn't automated (or was automated but no longer has knowledgeable people to maintain it) to fatally wound the corporation as a business.
And, of course, the CEO is famously unfamiliar with primate psychology. When an outsider comes in and kills all the senior leadership, then kills 50% of the troops, what do you think the survivors are going to do? The basic reactions:
- hide at the edges
- tell the outsider comforting lies
- gather a few friends by eye and leave
Oh, and thanks to the privatization, nobody at Twitter except the new CEO has any stock left in the company. There is no magic lottery ticket for any of them. Hopping to a job elsewhere is now the most sensible thing any of them can do -- the people who are still technically employed are all estimating how long they should wait for the market to absorb the current flood of laid-off folks so that the competition is not so fierce.
Twitter is dead; the zombie corpse will keep moving for about a year.
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