I’m an enthusiastic longtime paying user of Pocket Casts and Day One.
Now that employees are leaving in droves (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41872046) I fear for both.
Pocket Casts is the only podcast app that has ever clicked for me.
I’ve invested significant time and personal writing and media into Day One journals. Privacy concerns aside, it’s an app and platform I enjoy using.
How many of the employees fleeing Automattic couldn’t care less about WordPress but are the product and technical expertise behind these other products?
I of course can't say for sure, but I imagine most of Automattics products will continue running though maybe with a much lower frequency of updates.
For the last decade I have always signed up for Twitter, used it for a few months, deleted the account and stayed away for months/years and then returned. This is largely because I get addicted to Twitter.
My last return to Twitter, a few months ago, was the first time since the firings. And it is awful. Glitches all over the place. Bots all over the place.
This is the longest I’ve had a Twitter account because I have absolutely no reason to delete it since I have no desire to use it.
Also, I don’t use Twitter for politics at all. It’s almost entirely for sports/tech/science so it’s not a partisan thing.
All that being said, I think it’s absolutely true that Twitter could have reduced its workforce somewhat. Like every other tech company they had massively over hired during the pandemic and all of them have had deep layoffs. And Twitter was the poster child of “why does tech company X need so many employees”. But even then the impact of the cuts are very evident to me at least.
I think Twitter and Reddit share that title.
Reddit has something like 2000 employees, yet their platform's availability has never been amazing, and new web UI and the official mobile apps are both unusable. What do they do all day?