this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc.’s livestreaming site Twitch is poised to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers, according to people familiar with the plans, the latest in a series of job reductions there.

The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months. A Twitch spokesperson declined to comment.

Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are “prohibitively expensive,” according to a blog post he wrote.

Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit.

“It’s always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,’’ a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. “We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best.”

The former employees all declined to comment.

Since he took the position in March 2023, Clancy has been on a cross-country charm offensive to mend relations with the gaming celebrities who make a living streaming on Twitch. Many of them chafed at Twitch’s original approach to ads, which the company reworked after criticism. Streamers have praised Clancy’s desire to listen to their concerns after years of complaints that the service was out of touch with its users.

The new chief has struggled to stem losses, however. Twitch undertook two rounds of layoffs last year, cutting over 400 positions, part of wider job reductions at Amazon.

The online retail giant initiated its biggest-ever corporate job cuts in 2022, which it expanded to 27,000 positions across the company. It continued in October with a new round of cuts to its music division, which encompasses the company’s audio streaming platform and digital storefront for songs.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Amazon Web Services aka one of my picks for "massively underrated domestic threat to the US" is owned by, obviously, Amazon. It serves as a core backbone at this point for the internet as a whole. Any rational person would assume such power would be held by a government department or at the least be heavily regulated by one... wrong! Because America.

I've long thought that radicalising the people that could seize this is a fun fantasy but I can't see any simple way to do so when they are generally paid very well and pretty comfortable, unlike for example the staff in the amazon warehouses.

It's the same story with google and their private infrastructure like the backbone of datacenters they operate. Extremely high-risk.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The AWS corporate workers would never unionize until America is literally burning to the ground but the people operating the data centers on premise are a different story

There are a few examples of Google data center technicians trying to unionize. But tbh they're still not that easy of a target either

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/google-workers-explain-why-they-unionized/

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-contractors-allege-were-fired-160410018.html

There are a few chokepoints to target that don't include the office workers. For example, on Google Search and Bard, there's contractors responsible for training the ML models that unionized. Not saying that this specific example is a critical chokepoint though since this could be easily outsourced

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/group-of-google-contractors-who-work-on-win-union-vote.html

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Seizing that stuff at this point in American politics seems like, yes, total fantasy.

There is another S word though which is more possible

Slithering snakes scheming to stilt the stalks of society. "Stop sugaring my server, swarthy scoundrel!"

Sugaring is the word of the day. Is it word? I don't know. It is now. I hope no one sugars any servers though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah it's still certainly an infrastructural weakpoint. I think amazon knows this though, they employ ex-cia (""ex"" lol) for their security team (which coincidentally is also their union busting team). They probably keep some pretty serious monitoring on the staff members involved with these weakpoints and would drop them at the first sign of any links to radical groups.

We know they do company-wide monitoring for union busting, heatmapping out their facilities based on highest risk of unionisation too. They do some pretty advanced stuff.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Amazon outsources to the DoD and UK equivalent (whatever it's called)

So I do not doubt they have their own private teams on constant lookout and also basically the 5 eyes like secret service style surveillance going on at any given time. At least just keeping tabs on worker attitudes, their personal finances, and relationships to foreign governments and whatnot. It would be a "fun" little canary type thing if a worker directly for AWS gifted like $10K per month to a pro-Palestinian charity. Just do that and only that and never say anything online or in person and just see if they get more scrutiny at work, etc. Of course an impossible experiment. It would be interesting though

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It's not just outsourcing, it's definitely in-house teams of cia too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200901125940/https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1026060/intelligence-analyst

· Perform intelligence analysis of groups, actors, and incidents using advanced analytic techniques that transform relevant facts into meaningful insights; Analysts are also expected to develop intelligence collection plans that observe operational security (opsec), collect on intended topics/POIs/groups, adhere to responsible collection techniques, and are relevant to highlighting risk to the business

Preferred Qualifications:

· Previous experience in Intelligence analysis and or watch officer skill set in the intelligence community, the military, law enforcement, or a related global security role in the private sector.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

We need moles in those positions ASAP

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