I want to expand more on the comedy of errors that led to the eviction of #Twitter from their Boulder, Colorado office.

The story that leads up to this building even existing is bizarre and hilarious, so here goes...

A thread 🧵

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/judge-ruled-twitter-must-be-evicted-from-colorado-office-over-unpaid-rent/

Twitter evicted from office amid lawsuits over unpaid rent and cleaning bills

Twitter evicted in Boulder, Colo., still faces unpaid-rent suit at HQ in California.

Ars Technica

Twitter operated out of a Boulder office on Walnut St. for years, mostly housing the employees of Gnip, a company that sold Twitter data to enterprise customers which Twitter had acquired.

The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors, 3 and 4.

Over time the office morphed from being "Gnip" to being a genuine Twitter office, with folks from all kinds of teams working out of the office including Timelines, DMs, Health, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.

It grew fast.

By early 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks ("desk buddies"). People who were often in meetings (product mostly) were asked to hotdesk.

To alleviate this, Twitter leased the basement of the building, as floors 1 and 2 were leased to other companies. Construction on the basement location was pretty secretive, with the REW (Real Estate and Workplace) team wanting to unveil the new space in a grand opening when complete.

August 2019 the space opened and... everyone hated it.

Since it was in a basement, there were no windows. The entire area felt like some kind of Twitter-themed tomb with big glass walls or strange hanging "soundproof" panels separating work areas.

Nobody liked being down there because it was separated from the main common areas and all of the other employees. It felt isolated & lonely - coming into the office typically meant you wouldn't see anyone else from other floors except when you took the extremely slow elevator upstairs for lunch.

There was a great deal of drama as teams fought NOT to be reassigned to the "Twitter Dungeon" as it came to be called (REW hated this name and thwarted attempts to have laptop stickers printed).

It became the place to take meetings when the conference rooms on 3 & 4 were booked, or the floor with a guaranteed empty bathroom if the stalls were full.

People would come down to use the facilities, then ascend back to the surface world while we digital Drow asked if they had news from the up above.

laptop stickers

Always found them awkward. I mean, “…Is it one of those Express Yourself attempt at phone covers?” Always found them distracting.

×

It is stunning to think of all the people who were paid money to design & build this office, all to have the company kicked out of the space after hardly anyone ever even used it.

There have been so few people to ever be inside in that building that I would imagine everything is still in absolutely pristine condition, but branded with Twitter design that now has to be ripped out by a landlord who constructed the building just for Twitter, and never collected a dime.

A Judge ordered Twitter's eviction from the new office one year after the grand opening, to the day.

All of this sat unused, and un-paid-for, for a full calendar year.

An office space that thousands of people could have said, at any point during the 2 years of its construction, would sit abandoned after its opening.

All built to entice people to return to the office at a company that had announced WFH forever, and most of whom got fired before ever seeing the inside.

https://www.denverpost.com/2023/06/14/boulder-twitter-eviction-unpaid-rent/

Boulder landlord succeeds in evicting Twitter over unpaid rent

A judge for Boulder County’s district court permitted law enforcement to evict Twitter from its Boulder offices on May 31.

The Denver Post

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this almost completely unoccupied 4-floor building located in the S’Park neighborhood of central Boulder, which had no rent paid on it for a year before the occupant was finally evicted, is over 65,000 square feet - nearly double the 36,000 square feet of the Walnut office and the equivalent of 80 apartments.

Presently, Boulder, Colorado is rated #7 for most expensive home prices in the country.

@rodhilton
Is this the one they spent years fighting the height restrictions to get built in the first place?

I used to work on Walnut.

@rodhilton

I had just recently read the business-school case study of Circuit City, which continued building new stores up to the week they declared bankruptcy, and could not help but notice the similarities.

@harksaw @rodhilton that sounds interesting. Do you have links where I could read more about that?
What happened to Circuit City? - FourWeekMBA

Circuit City is an American electronics and appliance retailer originally founded in 1949 by Samuel Wurtzel. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after being an industry leader for decades. Circuit City suffered from complacent management who also made poor decisions. Many Circuit City stores were outdated and in poor locations. Stores were also staffed with salespeople pushing high-margin products at a time when consumers were moving toward cheap, low-margin products. Circuit City sold several of its most valuable assets to fund a four-year stock buyback. The move failed to arrest a steady decline in its share price and meant the company was unable to survive the coming GFC.

FourWeekMBA
@rodhilton This is like reading an article about old abandoned amusement parks recaptured by nature. Fascinating.
@rodhilton Behold, the Wonders of Capitalist Efficiency. :/

@Angle Your rant sounds to me like communism was efficient at some point in history.

It is always the oh-so-important and brilliant management that is responsible for such clusterfucks.

One rarely hears of politicians or managers who would have done any thing really well without their rank and file.

@a8e @Angle
Six words hardly constitute a rant.

(Btw I think both of you are right...)

@paelse Beg your pardon, I‘m no native speaker and thus not aware of the exact definition of „rant“.
@a8e
It means to go on and on about something and not always making sense.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rant
rant

1. to speak, write or shout in a loud, uncontrolled, or angry way, often saying…

@a8e @Angle No, it's just a note that capitalists are wasteful. Supply must be scarce in order to make a profit.
@a8e There are more economic systems than capitalism and communism. Not that they don't have their own problems, but, that's another rant. :P
@rodhilton so what’s happened to the space now? Who took over after Twitter… well, didn’t leave because they never came?
@MJBotte1 well the office is still all decorated for Twitter and the eviction only just happened so I assume it's still empty and the landlord is going to have to gut the place.
@rodhilton If our government had any gumption, it would commandeer that building and turn it into universal housing.
@rodhilton Turn the empty offices residential.
@mcv @rodhilton Turning commercial real estate into residential is much more difficult than it seems. Commercial buildings are designed with very few large restrooms/kitchenettes per floor, not set up for smaller residences with toilets/kitchens in each one.
@ev_rider_j @mcv @rodhilton Turn it into a school then. Can probably even keep the Twitter decorations.

@rodhilton
This is the most hilarious thing I have heard today.

Mismanagement at its finest.

Thanks for sharing.

@rodhilton
Thanks for writing that thread. Great to see stories on Boulder even if it's grown so much I don't even recognize it anymore.

@rodhilton Here’s the inverse story: REI built a beautiful, brand new headquarters in Bellevue, Washington.

The pandemic hit as construction was finishing, just before the building was to be occupied. But REI had already sold its old headquarters in nearby Kent, Washington.

Concerned more with cash than with sunk costs, REI sold the new headquarters building to Facebook. REI continues to have its headquarters employees work remotely.

@rodhilton

Wow that puts this story in a whole new light. Thanks for sharing that.

What a lovely looking place. So much attention to detail and what a waste.

I hope you landed on your feet in your post Twitter life.

@rodhilton What is this supposed to be? Faux loft? Warehouse chic?

@rodhilton
It's worth noting that the Boulder government intentionally caused the housing issue: they refused to allow new or dense housing to be built, favoring existing zoning and preserving all open space. Quite popular among residents regardless of the look. It's been that way for over 50 years. Is it changing? Will it ever change? Should it even? That's up to NIMBYs vs lawmakers. Such policies are the one thing that any hub or hub adjacent city who's state doesn't intervene can do to turn itself into a wealth favoring enclave within a mere generation.

Anyways, excellent commercial real estate failure story! Someone wiser is eventually going to love that space.

@rodhilton
Curious to know what REW stands for, googling doesn't help me—Real Estate something?
@rodhilton looking forward to seeing @AbandonedAmerica photo set of the office after it has sat empty for a few years.
@rodhilton incredible story. imagine how many apartments that money could have built.
@skotchygut @rodhilton I was just thinking along those lines - I'm no architect or builder but all these empty office buildings too bad they can't be easily converted into condos or apartments.
@MsMerope @rodhilton nope. waste of life for everyone involved. I feel like my boss wastes my energy, but it’s no where near the scale of this travesty.
@MsMerope @skotchygut @rodhilton I often think they would make good dorm style co-ops. With the little kitchenettes on each floor and big central dining hall
@rodhilton They hung an Under New Management sign in the interim. It would teach the new owner a better lesson if he got hauled off to jail in the middle of the night for breaking a city ordinance - which he did in San Francisco when he turned the headquarters into an AirBnB...
@rodhilton with Reddit and Twitter on the downfall, it makes you wonder what the future of social media will look like. I’m still getting used to Mastodon but I feel somewhat isolated at this point.
@will_lambert @rodhilton I agree with this. It's hard to see outside my small bubble.
@will_lambert @rodhilton I guess with Reddit actively destroying their own platform and Twitter getting shittier by the day, there will be more and more users on here.
According to statista, the userbase has grown 300% from nov'22 to march '23. And it is one of if not the fastest growing social media.
The only reason why few talk about it is the lack of advertisements, both on and for the platform.
Probably because it is a non profit with just 1 employee, who is also the CEO.

@stefanie @will_lambert @rodhilton
Some points:
Mastodon gGmbH nowadays has more than one employee, their website's team list is up to 10 names already.

But yes, due to the nature of the Fediverse, Mastodon, ActivityPub, it's rather a square peg in a game where everyone has only round holes. So yes, most people have problems matching it up with traditional social media, number wise, expectation wise, legally wise.

@stefanie @will_lambert @rodhilton E.g. because it's a federation of nodes, moderation and certain reward systems etc work simply different.

E.g. it has certainly more moderators than most other social media systems, each node's admin is at least a part-time moderator, for his part of heaven.

@yacc143 @will_lambert @rodhilton But that same structure makes it factually impossible for some Elongated Muskrat to just buy it, or a greedy Schmuck to drive off half the users by trying to push IPO prices.
And more and more people wake up to those facts.
@will_lambert I didn't really get a solid feed of interesting posts until I followed 80-100 people or so.. Can probably differ depending on who you follow - some post or boost *very* frequently - but probably good to aim for that as a starting point.

@jwarlander @will_lambert that meme about "x" starter pack would actually translate well to a Fedi/Mastodon "topic of your choice" accounts to follow starter pack..... Which I'm sure someone must have thought of or done by now for at least some topics?

In lieu, there's following the trending stuff on your preferred instance I suppose?

@krupo @will_lambert Yeah, I mean.. I started out with following people I knew about from other places, then picked some from my local & federated timelines, and mostly let things grow from there by adding people who got boosted etc.

But let's not forget following hashtags! Very useful for finding new things.

@jwarlander @krupo @will_lambert This list of lists of academics on Mastodon is also helpful. https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
GitHub - nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon: A list of various lists consisting of academics on Mastodon

A list of various lists consisting of academics on Mastodon - nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon

GitHub
@krupo @jwarlander @will_lambert there was a link to a fediverse directory recently. They were asking accounts to register the hashtags they used so new users could find communities.
FediLink (@fedilink@microblog.club)

Official profile of #FediLink - #Fediverse #directory where you can find people with common interests to #follow To add your profile at https://fedi.bihlink.com please follow this profile, add #Fed...

@will_lambert @rodhilton hopefully were just in the early days
@rodhilton is it just me or does that look like a children's playground/safe space not a work place?

@feedmd I only have pictures of the common areas. Lounge areas, kitchens, break rooms, bike storage, that sort of thing.

They didn't take pictures of the "work areas" because none of the engineers came in for the grand opening, and they didn't want to get pictures of the rows upon rows upon rows of completely empty desks with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of monitors and computer equipment sitting untouched.

@rodhilton @feedmd Also because open concept work areas are depressing, nobody wants to see pictures of that.
@feedmd @rodhilton Most of the modern Tech/Web company rooms I've worked at look like this. Walls are colored and there are comfortable/soft seating. The place looks more like a living room than an office. For some reason, that teal color is popular.
@david1 @feedmd @rodhilton I love those wonky shelving things. Very cool.
@lizzard @david1 @feedmd that shelf is designed to resemble an overhead view of the streets of Boulder

@rodhilton @feedmd throwback to the dot-com era.

A friendly reminder - this sort of waste is more common than people realize. Plenty of mostly empty office buildings.

The entire model is criminal. Remodels are extremely wasteful.