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[Continuation] Musk buys Twitter II

dudalb said:
Unless they have swiped stuff directly from Twitter, nothing illegal about their working for Meta. In fact, Stealing talent from other tech companies has been SOP in the Tech business since day one.
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And given that Musk fired the engineers (or at the very least constructively dismissed them) wouldn't any putative gardening leave clauses in their contracts be null and void?
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
And given that Musk fired the engineers (or at the very least constructively dismissed them) wouldn't any putative gardening leave clauses in their contracts be null and void?
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all noncompetes are null and void in California.

Attorney General Bonta Reminds Employers and Workers That Noncompete Agreements Are Not Enforceable Under California Law

California Attorney General Rob Bonta today issued an alert reminding employers and workers that noncompete agreements are not enforceable in California. Noncompete agreements generally require workers to refrain from accepting new employment opportunities in a similar line of work or establishing a competing business, usually for a specified period of time and within a geographic area. Although frequently found in high paying, highly technical jobs, these provisions are also found in lower-paying, less technical jobs and can have an adverse impact on labor market mobility and worker compensation. For example, a 2019 study estimates that 53% of noncompete workers are non-salaried, hourly wage employees, 14% of whom earn less than $40,000 a year. Attorney General Bonta reminds both employers and employees that noncompete agreements are prohibited in the state of California, and urges individuals who are wrongfully presented with a noncompete agreement to know their rights.
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https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-reminds-employers-and-workers-noncompete-agreements-are

Straight up not lawful and will not be enforced by a California court.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
Noncompetes are unenforceable in California anyway, where both companies are headquartered. "Poaching" is just boss speak for the normal functioning of the at-will labor market. Twitter would have to demonstrate some outrageously bad behavior by former employees (like ripping off proprietary code or other trade secrets) to have any kind of claim, which seems extremely dubious since Threads seems to be a text-based ripoff of Instagram more than anything else.
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Good catch. I should have put 'poaching' in scare quotes.
 
arthwollipot said:
I can see Elon as the kind of person who will fork out the $500M just to make the problem go away.
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The whole problem exists because he refuses to pay his bills.

All he had to do was pay his severance agreements when firing these people. The US is already ridiculously boss friendly and Musk still managed to **** it up.

My prediction is this is going to end up costing way more than just doing the right thing from the start, and these people are still going to end up with their severance, plus maybe a bit of annoyance pay and their legal bills covered. Another genius gambit by Musk.
 
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TurkeysGhost said:
The whole problem exists because he refuses to pay his bills.

All he had to do was pay his severance agreements when firing these people. The US is already ridiculously boss friendly and Musk still managed to **** it up.

My prediction is this is going to end up costing way more than just doing the right thing from the start, and these people are still going to end up with their severance, plus maybe a bit of annoyance pay and their legal bills covered. Another genius gambit by Musk.
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And because of this and other idiocies on Musk's part; both Twitter and Musk's Tesla shares* are soon going to be owned by his creditors.

* Which have massively increased recently because Galaxy Brain Elon isn't paying attention and the company can concentrate on being a car manufacturing company and not an Elon placating one.
 
jeremyp said:
Musk is now suing four alleged web scrapers for degrading its servers.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...es-them-for-twitters-impaired-user-experience

That probably tells us all we need to know about the gradual degradation of Twitter's infrastructure.
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Odds of these scrapers, if they are ever identified, being in a jurisdiction where they can actually be sued?

Scraping seems like the kind of grey area where people doing it don't operate in the US. pure speculation on my part though.
 
The defendants, known only by their IP addresses so far, allegedly "engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter" by "flooding Twitter's sign-up page with automated requests."
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I wonder who it might be? And why?

Would Meta have some sort of reason? I think it's know that search engines like Google and Bing do something like this, otherwise the search engines would not be able to find new tweets. Although presumably they only search the new stuff as it comes out, not "every tweet ever made in a short period of time" (because they already have the old tweets that haven't changed recently)
 
TurkeysGhost said:
Odds of these scrapers, if they are ever identified, being in a jurisdiction where they can actually be sued?
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There's speculation in the comments on the story that the IP addresses belong to Twitter.

Scraping seems like the kind of grey area where people doing it don't operate in the US. pure speculation on my part though.
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No, lots of people do web scraping. Search engines do web scraping all the time. I've done it in the past in situations where the web site from which I wanted information didn't have a proper API available externally.

Twitter recently closed its free API which means that a lot more people are going to be doing web scraping.
 
Anyone know if ads via Twitter are passed thru the thread reader app? I'm now boycotting Twitter after elons latest bs, pushed me over the cliff. I don't want one red cent of mine going to him via ad views.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Anyone know if ads via Twitter are passed thru the thread reader app? I'm now boycotting Twitter after elons latest bs, pushed me over the cliff. I don't want one red cent of mine going to him via ad views.
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I read a thread reader app unrolled thread and it had ads, and I think those are to monetise threadreaderapp.com, not sucked in from Twitter. There was no text in the thread that sounded like an ad.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Anyone know if ads via Twitter are passed thru the thread reader app? I'm now boycotting Twitter after elons latest bs, pushed me over the cliff. I don't want one red cent of mine going to him via ad views.
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Does Twitter get money just for showing you the ad? Does it get money for carrying the ad or does it only get money for click throughs?

Only in the first of those three cases would Twitter get money for you viewing its pages and then an ad blocker would probably fix it.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Anyone know if ads via Twitter are passed thru the thread reader app? I'm now boycotting Twitter after elons latest bs, pushed me over the cliff. I don't want one red cent of mine going to him via ad views.
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Adblocker on your browser (on PC or smartphone) and using the web version blocks all ads and promoted tweets, but you'll need to have a Twitter account. If you're using on PC, the "Block the blue" plug in works really well to improve the experience by automatically blocking blue check accounts you encounter, eventually leading to less low quality junk getting boosted to the tops of the comments section you see.
 
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Not negative cash flow exactly. Much like pillow boy they have effectively blocked cash flow where it doesn't shut the whole works down.
Debt building and simply ignoring the uncomfortable stuff will work for a while but he doesn't have the luck to hold this forever.
 
Darat said:
That's much better than I'd have thought.

ETA: "....50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load..."

Hmmm... I wonder why that is?
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I find it hilarious when Musk talks about saving Twitter from its enormous debt. I think he’s actually trying to gaslight people into believing it was there before he took over.
 
jeremyp said:
I find it hilarious when Musk talks about saving Twitter from its enormous debt. I think he’s actually trying to gaslight people into believing it was there before he took over.
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You can bet that when this thing finally gives up the ghost, Elon will try to save face by claiming that Twitter was already doomed before he took over.

That still makes him look like a moron that overpaid for a lemon. No way to slice this failure that doesn't make Musk look like a fool. He never should have bought this thing to begin with, and every decision after that has been wrong.
 
Puppycow said:
He could have saved a lot of money by just buying a sports team instead of Twitter.

In this case he's just going to add to his legal expenses. Maybe he's so rich that he doesn't care.
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No, it's going to add to Twitter's legal expenses. It's Twitter suing, not Musk (personally).
 
Advertisers will surely be running back now that Musk has given accused and arrested sex trafficker Andrew Tate $20k as part of the new twitter blue monetization program.

Self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate says he was paid $20,000 under Elon Musk's content-creator plan
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https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-tate-elon-musk-twitter-paid-content-creator-plan-2023-7

A bit of discontent even among the Elon fanboys because it seems that the small number of people selected to receive payouts was largely arbitrary. Catturd2, important right wing social media personality (lol) and previous Elon booster, was noticeably miffed by the snub.

Right-Wing Influencers Are Furious Elon Didn’t Pay Them to Tweet
Musk is being accused of playing favorites as he hands out cash payments to certain creators
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/twitter-monetization-program-angers-excluded-influencers-1234789808/

Not really seeing how a one-off payment to an arbitrarily selected set of right wing clout-chasers is going to have any real lasting impact on how the site operates, but I'm not a genius like Musk.
 
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