I wonder if the harsh content moderation guidelines were a strategic decision by Meta to make a Twitter alternative that’s actually financially sustainable. Assuming that twitter struggled with advertisers because of their lax approach to moderation (especially porn).
The article doesn’t even provide enough detail to make an informed decision if this is a problem or not. They state 45% of layoffs in the tech industry were women, then only contrast with Metas 63% male workforce to get to the conclusion that women were more affected by the layoffs. Without noting if metas male dominant workforce is on to high or low side for the industry.
Then the article goes on to explain that the positions most affected were the traditionally female dominated roles, HR, recruitment, etc. (I.e., the non “tech” roles that one would expect tech companies to inherently value less as a core part of their business).
This isn’t to say the tech industry isn’t male dominated, doesn’t have issues with recruiting and retaining women in tech roles, etc. I just wanted to know more about this and was left with more questions be because the framing of the article is so poor.
Why is everything to do with this story completely unsurprising.
Seems reddit admins have taken a “get in line or get lost” approach to their volunteer mods. Let’s see how that works out for them.
Twitter has many problems that makes it’s hard for it to generate profit. Sure Musk’s ‘free-speech’ twitter has made it worse but I think twitter has struggled with profit generation since day one (I think it had a few good years recently before Musk took over) and the prevalence of porn didn’t help.
Threads moderation may be puritan but it is advertiser friendly. And as long as the millions of active accounts stay engaged it looks like a much better alternative than twitter for advertisers.