We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 27th, 2022.
In this special, breaking news edition of Oxide and Friends, Bryan Cantrill was joined by Joshua M. Clulow, Charity Majors, mick, Rishi Desai, linear cannon, ignaloidas, Craig Traynor, Cargo Occultist, and Aaron David Goldman. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- @1:10 Is it time to replace Twitter?
- They could release all the supervillains into Gotham, or, it could not go bad
- Trump being let-on / kept-off is going to be the canary in the coalmine
- Is there a bot problem?
- @6:02 There was what seems like an audio disconnect, and we pick up with Charity Majors
- People don't want a lefty-version of Truth Social
- Diverse views are good, 8chan is bad
- The expensive part at this point isn't the tech, it's the moderation
- Difference between the public square and the product
- Advertising - the people are the product
- Are there conditions that would cause folks to leave Twitter, even if it benefits our businesses to be there?
- @12:37 Would Trump and/or other trolls be let back in?
- What about Twitter makes it valuable - the network effect
- Would Elon open true API access?
- Will advertisers step back?
- Will availability be impacted? Charity hopes so.
- @21:00 Is firing 2/3 of the employees advisable?
- During the sale, the conversation always settled around fiduciary responsibility to shareholders
- What's happening with the CEO? Will it only ever be Elon?
- @29:45 X, the app for everything
- Who would be the ideal hire? Sheryl Sandberg? Amoral, ruthlessly competent
- What does Elon think about social audio / Twitter Spaces?
- What about removal of block/mute?
- Would Twitter go public again?
- @37:45 Predictions
- Lots of strategies around reductions in force
- Embarrassing outage
- Shitty advertising
- Fedaverse and Mastadon
- Smaller communities like Discord or Matrix
- @1:01:35 Releasing the supervillains
- Many of the supervillains are off on other platforms like Gab
- Do downvotes go away?
- Very aggressive focus on money, advertising effectiveness, optimistic that quality will have to get better to attain that
- @1:18:19 Blue checkmarks
- People (front-line and execs) angling to be laid off and offered packages first
- Need to win hearts and minds, find the people you absolutely want to keep
- Twitter had/has a culture internally that Twitter was not good, or not good enough. We can do better, so therefore we must.
- Every new feature got scrutiny with the question "Hey, could this be used to start a genocide?"
- Humility was pushed down from the top
- GDPR threw a big wrench into the systems designed to never lose data
- Lots of work needed for essentially tech debt made iteration of product slow. Speed increases in releases isn't necessarily related to Elon's arrival.
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!