this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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There's just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them -- and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.

I believe this fits well under the "fuck around and find out" doctrine.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I simultaneously want Threads to fuck off and also decimate Musk's Twitter. But ultimately I want both to fail.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

If they could double KO in the process that would be nice

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Let them eat eachother out

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

That was definitely a choice of words

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm on the outside hoping a gas leak takes out the entire stadium.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (7 children)

To be honest I kinda want threads to crush Twitter because I despise Musk so much, a lot more than Zuckerberg. Yes, Meta is a horrible company who steals all your data but if I just look at the person behind it I would know who I would kill if I only can choose one. Threads isn't a Lemmy competitor anyway, they work so different. I think Mastodon might get an issue because sites like Mastodon/Threads/Twitter are all about getting famous people on your site and let's be real: Most famous people are not hardcore nerds, some of them might not even heard of Linux. If they can choose between Twitter itself, Twitter by Facebook , or Twitter for nerds (c'mon you know that's true at the moment) I don't know what they will choose but I DO know what they will NOT choose. I hope Twitter fails because it turns into a shit hole and threads fails because it never reaches critical mass.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that's the best case scenario I think. I do want it to crush Twitter though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Best case scenario is threads splits off enough to take critical mass away from twitter, but not enough to get it for itself.....so they both just die off.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man, who could've predicted that this would age very poorly?

Everyone, you say?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I love how this statement is dripping with condescension for the people who built the service he's currently driving into the ground - all while thinking of himself as some kind of super genius.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This confirms what everybody has been saying: this letter is just a PR stunt.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Elon Musk's entire existence is a PR stunt. After all, they already fired their marketing department.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Non compete clauses are illegal in California.

It's dumb that they're not illegal everywhere but Twitter and Facebook are both located there.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

They're rarely enforceable elsewhere, anyway. They usually depend on intimidating people, since they're not likely to win in court for the vast majority of cases (which is why they should be straight up illegal).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It's fairly ridiculous. So long as they don't take company property with them from the previous employer, there really shouldn't be an issue. Patents should be more than sufficient to protect IP. If you're concerned about someone building on that patent independently, you should probably do what it takes to keep them.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

this is the same guy that says that wfh is unethical. he clearly sees workers as his serfs since he feels entitled to their work even after firing them.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes we fired them! No we didn't pay their severances!

But also.... MINE.

Elon is such a pathetic twat.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Also forced them into arbitration, then refused to arbitrate the dispute.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

He's such a fucking cry baby

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The cream on top of this cherry is that Meta claim that they don’t have any ex-twitter employees.

“Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor that Twitter’s accusations are baseless. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said.”

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's kind of weird that Musk assumes there's anything special about Twitter that you couldn't build in a few weeks with a competent dev team.

The only value Twitter has/had is its user base. There's no patents or intellectual property that can be sold off if they lose that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, It is definitely a case of taking US$44 billion and throwing it away. But it is worse than that, because Twitter was a resource for the internet community.

And his attempts to make money after the fact are as pathetic as a World Leader using his position to spruik tins of beans.

It is almost like some sort of performance art.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I never liked that the supposed public square on the internet was in private hands, it should've always been a protocol like Usenet or Mastodon where anyone could spin up a server and participate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Musk is being an immature crybaby again, but there's a certain pattern of Facebook/Meta hiring execs who used to work on competing products only to gain an insight perspective on their competitors' plans by milking them for insider information.

They did the same when Google+ launched.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Let me try to see if I get the logic here. So a company fires a lot of people, and then another company hires them.

These workers then are leveraged by the new company to do something similar to what they have been doing in the previous company. This allows the new company to create a competing product that seems to capture part of the previous company's market.

But now the first company wants to sue the second company for... leveraging those recently dismissed workers?

One of those companies seem to be acting in a very strategically sound way, and it's not the one which fired those workers in the first place...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Zuck and Meta are massive pieces of garbage but seeing Elon get owned where it hurts is hilarious lol

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've heard Zuck called a lot of names. A LOT of them, most of them well deserved and fitting...but I've not heard very many people call him stupid or bad at his job.

Elon on the other hand....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The thing is, Zuck doesn't have a rabid fan base who licks the shit he drops as he walks. Zuck sucks but he keeps to himself and his business most of the time. Elon on the other hand has a huge rabid fanbase who treat him like he's the messiah reincarnate. Which makes it all the more satisfying when Elon loses over Zuck. Seeing Zuck doing something and failing just makes me shrug and say "He deserved it." Elon, on the other hand, I REVEL in seeing his stupidity bite him in the ass again and again.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing capitalists (not to be confused with the capitalism sycophant, self-hating peasants that don't hold significant capital and never will but call themselves capitalists) despise more than actual competition.

The goal of unchecked, unregulated capitalism is to end capitalism, ie competition.

That's why entire industries merge into a single entity to create a monopoly, as the regulators the oligarchs captured decades ago that were supposed to prevent such anticompetitive behaviors sit back passively with their rubber stamps.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People always call this a market failure while willfully ignoring that whenever markets are left unchecked, this is the inevitable outcome.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

"How dare they use our abandoned slaves? Slave should stay forever loyal to their master no matter how we mistreat it. They are our property, we have all rights to their use, skills and knowledge."

If this goes anywhere, Confederacy actually won the long game.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Elon views even previous, no longer employed workers as his slaves for life. The truly disturbing thing is he's not the only one with that mindset.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wait, so Elon doesn't want the people he fired, but he also doesn't like it when they move to the competition? Is this guy fucking ret*rded or something?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

He's surprised because he told his managers to "kill half the staff." They assumed he meant lay them off.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it's about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.

But right now, it's entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven't seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.

If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That's fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter's publicly available data.

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