(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Bye-Bye, Birdie! [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-08 Bye-bye! Recently, one of Silicon Valley’s renowned creations and premier platform for getting out the word, Twitter, lost its soul to someone named Elon Musk. I rather like Elon Musk, in many respects, because he has nifty cars and spaceships. He has flashy companies and boring companies. He, at least, gets out there in public and stimulates thought. I am all for people thinking, liberally. So all that’s to the good, but along with the good comes the bad, frequently, and Mr. Musk is just doing a bad job with his word company. He got off on the wrong foot by opening up the platform to people who want to destroy civilization. In doing that, he allowed his word company to promote hate words from the vilest humans. People like D. Trump, who are plain, old racists and misogynists. And for just that, we should hope that the company goes under, to be replaced by a company that helps put civilization together, rather than taking it apart. A Little History The turn to the dark side isn’t the only reason I have a seed to pick with Twitter. I also have a personal reason, and to understand that, you’ll need just a bit of my personal history. I spent about twenty-five years in Silicon Valley, on all sides of the equation. One of those sides was as a tech worker. Before that, I was a tech worker in the Research Triangle Park. Before working in RTP for a computer company, I owned and ran a small software company, which employed programmers to write software for small businesses. I have a personal stake in tech work. Mr. Musk seems to be abusing his tech workers. I take that personally. Reports are that he’s laid off or lost 75% of them. He told them what appear to be lies, like that he’d give them three months of severance, but now wants to go back on his word. But even worse, he wants them to sign up to be abused. He wants them to work until they drop (figuratively, if maybe not quite literally). I’m not opposed to hard or long work hammering software into place. I’ve had weeks in excess of 80 hours. I’ve spent more than 24 hours at a time fixing technical problems. As a salaried employee, I didn’t get one extra cent for that. But the difference is I did that because I wanted to solve the problem, not because my employer demanded it. I did it because I’m a professional. I did it because I have pride in my work. I did it because, in its own odd way, it was fun and rewarding. I did not do it because I owed my soul to the company. A Little More History As a summer job in college I worked at a plastics factory. On a regular basis, an itinerant tool and die maker would come in and create molds, which we then used to make plastic parts. Without this man, there would have been no plastics company. Without his work, I would not have had a job. The tech workers in the tech industry are the modern-day tool and die makers. It is their work that allows tech companies to manufacture the products we use every day in our modern stone age. I venture to guess that every day you pick up a rock and look at its screen to get things like the weather and the news. The tech workers are the ones who make the devices that produce those rocks, with their channels for electrons. Or fill them with patterns of electrons so that they can talk with you and play with you and connect you to your family and friends. Most of these tool and die makers are not itinerant. They have a stable relationship with a company, because this unbelievably magical job has become de rigueur in our society. It is the foundation on which tech companies operate, and on which the tech industry resides, and therefore on which our modern, relatively comfortable life rests. In its own way, this is why USA is Number One. It’s why we have the best military in the world and the biggest economy in the world. Tech workers make that possible. It isn’t right to abuse these workers. And, it isn’t smart. The Will To Work Every tech company wants to get as much value as possible from its tech workers. As president of my little software company, I wanted my workers to write good and plentiful code. I totally understand the need, as the CEO of a business, to get value for money from employees. It’s a business, not an amusement ride. However, there are appropriate ways to do this. I’ll give you an example. When I worked in RTP, someone put up a clipping from a newspaper (more than likely, The San Jose Mercury News) about a hot new company in Cupertino run by Jimmy Treybig (pronounced “try big”, for those who don’t have the appropriate background). The text of this article is lost to me, but that was not the important part of the article. The important part was the picture of the swimming pool. Along with this picture, the article noted that the company (Tandem Computers) threw a beer bash every Friday at the end of the work day. Why? Why would a company trying hard to make money waste it on beer for employees? Because it ensured that those employees came to work on Fridays and stayed at work until (at least) 6:00 PM. It was a cheap way to get more product out of very, very expensive employees. That’s why. Many other companies brought in pizza on Fridays, which is arguably cheaper than beer, leading to the well-known joke that programmers are just machines for turning pizza into (computer) code. It is totally unnecessary to demand long hours from tech workers. Tech workers are tech workers almost to a worker because they love the work. The way to get value for money is to spend whatever you have to make their jobs productive. Give them a suitable work environment. Give them processor power. Give them pizza. Let them work from home, thus cutting hours of unnecessary and debilitating commute from their work weeks (and allowing them to concentrate on code, for heaven’s sake!). Don’t demotivate them by insisting that they sacrifice their families (such as they are) for their jobs. The Bottom Line If you were to go to someone in Silicon Valley for funding, one of the first things they would want to know is your value proposition. How is your business going to make money? The value proposition for most social media companies, Musk’s word company included, is this: We will provide an enormous and growing audience, and advertisers will pay us to reach that audience. If we want to change Twitter’s behavior, we need to affect that value proposition. The way to do that is to eliminate as much of their audience as possible. What can we do? The first thing we should do is avoid Musk’s word company. I dumped my account. I suggest you do the same, if you have one. Don’t link to Twitter. I avoid recommending stories and comments with excessive links to Twitter. I suggest you avoid recommending such stories. If you are writing stories, just don’t link to that company. These links are mostly unnecessary, anyway. If there’s information on Twitter, typically that information is hosted elsewhere, and Twitter is simply pointing you there. Instead of linking to Twitter, link to the original source. That’s more helpful to the people putting up the content, anyway, because they get more credit. They get the clicks. Daily Kos should re-evaluate its policy on Twitter. Our site should stop facilitating these links. People on staff should avoid using them. So, if you want Twitter to behave like a contributing member of society, stop providing audience for their advertisers. And stop facilitating others to be that audience. If we alter their bottom line, they will change their behavior. Please join me in changing the direction of this company. They are on the wrong path. Help get them on the right path. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/8/2146142/-Bye-Bye-Birdie Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/