With massive layoffs expected to hit Twitter tomorrow, on Thursday employees once again endured an agonizing day-long silence from the company’s leadership. As they have ever since Musk completed his acquisition of the company a week ago today, employees worked to piece together what he and his team have planned.
Some of the product road map is, by this point, well known: Musk plans to begin charging for verification through Twitter Blue, likely at $8 a month; he is exploring a revival of the short-form video product Vine; he is considering allowing creators to put video posts behind a paywall, OnlyFans-style. The New York Times also reported today that the company is looking into letting users pay to send direct messages to high-profile users.
But information shared with Platformer reveals further changes planned for Twitter. Some are in the earliest exploratory stages, and the mercurial Musk could change his mind about any of them. But here are some of the possibilities under discussion.
The Blue team has been told to finish writing code for paid verification on Saturday, with plans to launch on Monday. The product formerly known as Super Follows, which lets creators put some of their tweets behind a paywall, is set to relaunch as “subscriptions” on November 11.
Twitter’s four-month old Notes product, which allowed long-form writing on the platform, has been put on an indefinite “pause.” And Revue, the newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in early 2021, is scheduled to be shut down by the end of the year.
A recently revealed plan to build a crypto wallet for Twitter appears to be on pause as well.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, plans to reboot Vine are coming into focus.
Musk authorized the reboot in an email on Sunday, sources said. Musk is said to be deeply interested in video, and TikTok in particular.
The company had already been thinking through how to integrate an endlessly scrolling feed of videos before the takeover. After Musk expressed interest, Reed Martin, the company’s current head of design, was asked to come back early from parental leave to help accelerate the project, sources said.
Product leaders have told employees that the easiest way to revive Vine is to let users create the looping 6.47-second videos using the camera inside the Twitter app. Vines could then be posted natively to Twitter.
After that project is completed, leaders have said, the company would work to build a new surface inside the Twitter app allowing users to scroll through Vines.
One idea that has been floated to get Twitter users to make Vines: encouraging them to film their reactions to tweets.
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All of this has taken place against a backdrop of intense, sometimes overwhelming pressure. Teams are being told to hit launch timelines to the minute, and are sleeping in the office accordingly. After one large meeting, a director issued the following warning, according to an account of the event on Slack: “If the deadline slips, even by one hour, you’re fired.”
On Blind, the pseudonymous forum for workers to discuss their jobs, one Twitter employee said they were at the breaking point.
“I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true,” wrote the worker, in a post headlined “I can’t cope.” They continued:
Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. If we take PTO or leave, we’re gone.
People are working ridiculous hours.I’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it.
I can’t cope. I’m an absolute mess. I’m at breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.
The post concludes: “If you have the power to do so, please sort this mess out.”
By Thursday afternoon, though, teams were all still moving full speed ahead. To the extent that they were taking a break from building, it was to write moving farewell posts in Slack.
Within hours, 3,738 of them could lose their jobs, according to a screenshot of a post about “severance calculations” that circulated widely within the company on Wednesday. But the list is being closely held, leaving the entire company holding its breath.
And so before they lose access to Slack, their email, and everything else, employees are thanking their coworkers and sharing their contact information.
Just in case.
Elsewhere in Twitter: Days of Rest are canceled, to be replaced by Days of Torment. More than 1 million users may have left the platform in recent days. Many of them are going to Mastodon.
But maybe you should just pay $8 for Twitter?
Musk reads
US officials are considering opening an investigation into Elon Musk’s Twitter deal and whether foreign investors, including a Saudi prince, might have been given special privileges to access user data. (Faiz Siddiqui, Jeff Stein and Joseph Menn / Washington Post)
Elon Musk met with civil rights groups and agreed not to reinstate banned accounts until there was a clear process in place for doing so. The move angered his right-wing fans. (Naomi Nix, Drew Harwell and Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post)
Right-wingers are already beginning to turn on Musk over his suspiciously friendly stance toward content moderation. (Nikki McCann Ramirez / Rolling Stone)
Mike Masnick walks Musk through the content moderation learning curve, hilariously, from “we’re a free speech platform, everything goes” to the status quo. (Mike Masnick / TechDirt)
Meta executive Nick Clegg said “Welcome to the club” to Elon Musk after Musk tweeted that he was being criticized from both the left and the right. (Salvador Rodriguez / Wall Street Journal)
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says she isn’t concerned about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but noted she’s “very glad” the project is now independent. (Joel Khalili / Wired)
On the podcast this week: Kevin and I asked two current Twitter employees to come on the show and talk about their experiences over the past few days, which one of them likened to “hack week with a gun to your head.” They offered candid, emotional accounts of a workplace in turmoil — I’m grateful to them for coming on, and I think all of you will enjoy the conversation. It drops Friday morning at these links:
Apple | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon | Google
Governing
Republican candidates are continuing to peddle the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen — and these claims get more engagement on Twitter and Facebook than their average posts. (Davey Alba and Jack Gillum / Bloomberg)
Online groups in key battleground states are already spreading conspiracy theories about election fraud in the midterms and calling on voters to take in-person action. (Mark Scott / Politico)
Censorship concerns have never been louder, but political figures on both the right and the left are attacking long-accepted principles of the First Amendment and Section 230, frequently in ways that are logically incoherent. A great piece on an urgent subject. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)
Democrats are paying social media influencers to reach young and diverse voters, skirting political ad rules. (Stephanie Lai / New York Times)
Rumble is hosting content from RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet. Last year, the conservative social platform received a major investment from a VC firm co-founded by J.D. Vance and backed by Peter Thiel. (Danny Hakim / New York Times)
TikTok updated its privacy policy to tell European users more clearly that TikTok employees outside the EU, including in China, have access to their user data. (Dan Milmo / The Guardian)
Industry
WhatsApp rolled out Communities, a new feature to help organizations, clubs, schools, and other private groups have larger, more structured discussions. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)
Meta is replacing the human editors that curate its News tab in the UK with artificial intelligence. ( William Turvill / PressGazette)
Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. (Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)
Netflix is continuing to haggle with major studios for the right to run ads against their content as part of the streaming platform’s ad-supported tier launch. (Suzanne Vranica, Joe Flint and Sarah Krouse / Wall Street Journal)
OpenAI released the DALL-E API in public beta, allowing developers to integrate DALL-E directly into their apps and products. (Sharon Goldman / VentureBeat)
Twitch launched a new feature called Guest Star that allows streamers to easily pull creators and fans into their streams. (Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch)
Patreon is finally launching a native and ad-free video hosting feature. (Mia Sato / The Verge)
Grindr founder Joel Simkhai has a new gay dating app called Motto — the tagline is “No more headless torsos.” What’s wrong with headless torsos?? (Blake Montgomery / Gizmodo)
Google is building an AI writing tool called Wordcraft that help authors craft new and better stories. It uses the company’s conversational AI model LaMDA. (Victoria Song / The Verge)
Google is rolling out a small update to Gmail to allow users to track package deliveries directly from their inbox. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)
Google added the Google Lens tool to the google.com homepage. (Abner Li / 9To5Mac)
Those good tweets
Talk to us
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