![]() “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. “There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.” “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. “We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency. Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.” “As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. The team that worked on that service left the company in November. It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.Īn even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study. Īlmost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. “Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is. It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. ( Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)ĭissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker. “You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.Įmployees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.” ![]() “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. “Elon Musk dissolving” / Stable Diffusionįor weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. ![]()
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