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I'm short Twitter. The fact of the matter is it that Twitter should never have become a multibillion-dollar company. There is no barrier to entry into this spac

I'm short Twitter. The fact of the matter is it that Twitter should never have become a multibillion-dollar company. There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects, and those have proved weak due to poor user experience, particularly for new users. Twitter should have treated itself like a utility, and focused less on the online advertising race-to-the-bottom that it is sure to lose due to the aforementioned poor user experience and negative sentiment about the platform's future; this announcement is only going to continue to contribute to poor impressions. The other monetization directions they have played around with---namely selling access to researchers and advertisers, and certifying identities of accounts for celebrities and brands---are a much better fit for the platform, and would have sustained a fast-moving company of 50 hotshot engineers. But the constant pressure to get bigger and bigger has served Twitter poorly. I'm sad to say that I think it will be a ghost town in a few years.

paulpauper 11y ago
You got to have balls of steel to short a company like Twitter. I would rather short oil, gas, or commodity companies . Facebook stock, for example, is up 200% since 2012, leaving a lot of shorts burned in the process who thought it was overvalued.
- joncooper 11y ago
  Are you a professional investor?
davidcgl 11y ago
> any competent web developer could make A non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.
- talmand 11y ago
  What do you mean? I fully believe that a competent developer could sit down and make something like Twitter in a weekend. Especially since the concept and what to do with it is already on display for them to copy. Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.
  - nkohari 11y ago
    You could create something that looks like Twitter, but you couldn't create Twitter. Ignoring the network effects and scale that Twitter has is ignoring its primary value.
    - talmand 11y ago
      That's my point.
      - nkohari 11y ago
        It's hard for me to get that from what you wrote. It seemed that your point was more that the existence of Twitter means it's easy to reproduce it, but before Twitter, it was difficult to envision a site like Twitter. My counterpoint is that it's not actually the idea that's interesting, it's the fact that they've convinced lots of people to use it, and have built a system powerful enough to support that scale.
        001sky 11y ago
        The original comment expressly states a "non-scaling" version of twitter...what is so hard about that? this sub=thread then clearly illustrates what "non-scaling" means and doesn't mean. smh
        mwfunk 11y ago
        The poster was stating that writing Twitter was easy, anyone can do it, the only thing Twitter really has going for it are the network effects of having a huge user base and lots of visibility. I do think that Twitter's biggest asset are the network effects that it currently enjoys, but I don't think that it would be trivial to recreate what they've done in order to create a Twitter competitor. It's not insurmountable, but it's not trivial either. The original comment was clearly meant to trivialize the engineering. "One guy can do it in a weekend" is hyperbole, it's something you say when you're trying to communicate that anyone can do something in a relatively short amount of time. If there are a bunch of downvotes I would assume they're more for the hyperbole than people actually disagreeing with whether or not one weekend is enough time to write "non-scaling Twitter", which isn't specific enough for anyone to argue about how long it would take to do.
- metaphorm 11y ago
  Its a credible claim. Social media apps are a fairly basic kind of CRUD app, and if you forego the complex layers of privacy settings and permissions, monetization schemes, and scalability issues you end up with what amounts to a weekend project for an experienced developer. Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity. The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.
  - davidcgl 11y ago
    I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.
paulpauper 11y ago
lol if it's so easy, I implore you to create a Twitter competitor... and to make your challenge easier, instead of it being worth $20 billion, we'll lower the bar to, say, $150 million. It's already been done..every major web 2.0 success has many clones that all tried but failed to gain the necessary momentum and marketshare to become as successful as Twitter or Dropbox, for example. Even Evernote, despite all the attention and funding it has gotten, is stuck in the ruts. Yes, the coding part can be replicated, but getting the users and traction is the hardest part.
- richmarr 11y ago
  kylebgorman posted that comment 2 hours ago, he must be half way done building his Twitter-but-better by now. I'm on the edge of my seat, I can tell you.
- misiti3780 11y ago
  to further your point (i think) app.net tried and failed build a competitor: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/app-net#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/app-net#/entity
jerrickhoang 11y ago
> There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects As a backend engineer, I feel offended by this statement of yours.
- niccaluim 11y ago
  They did say "non-scaling." Though that's a bit like saying any competent shipbuilder could build a non-floating boat.
curiousjorge 11y ago
I have to say that for Facebook as well. When the IPFS picks up, we'll have a distributed clone of twitter and facebook that runs on such architecture. There would be no desire or need for advertisement or money making or tracking people when there are no owners, no benefactors but the people using it. The end is nigh for traditional SV unicorns that offer no barrier to entry in a distributed and anonymous internet.
Xyik 11y ago
lol - so which features are you going to exclude? Is your weekend-twitter-app going to support a feed, favoriting / reteweeting only to your followers / dming only between followers / ability to block / filter / rate-limit users who tweet-spam / mobile app / push notifications / e-mails to new users who sign-up / and various other necessary features an app usually has before it even launches a MVP?
qq66 11y ago
Making a Twitter minus the scaling and network effects is like playing basketball minus dribbling or shooting.

paulpauper 11y ago

You got to have balls of steel to short a company like Twitter. I would rather short oil, gas, or commodity companies . Facebook stock, for example, is up 200% since 2012, leaving a lot of shorts burned in the process who thought it was overvalued.

joncooper 11y ago
Are you a professional investor?

davidcgl 11y ago

> any competent web developer could make A non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.

talmand 11y ago
What do you mean? I fully believe that a competent developer could sit down and make something like Twitter in a weekend. Especially since the concept and what to do with it is already on display for them to copy. Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.
- nkohari 11y ago
  You could create something that looks like Twitter, but you couldn't create Twitter. Ignoring the network effects and scale that Twitter has is ignoring its primary value.
  - talmand 11y ago
    That's my point.
    - nkohari 11y ago
      It's hard for me to get that from what you wrote. It seemed that your point was more that the existence of Twitter means it's easy to reproduce it, but before Twitter, it was difficult to envision a site like Twitter. My counterpoint is that it's not actually the idea that's interesting, it's the fact that they've convinced lots of people to use it, and have built a system powerful enough to support that scale.
      - 001sky 11y ago
        The original comment expressly states a "non-scaling" version of twitter...what is so hard about that? this sub=thread then clearly illustrates what "non-scaling" means and doesn't mean. smh
        mwfunk 11y ago
        The poster was stating that writing Twitter was easy, anyone can do it, the only thing Twitter really has going for it are the network effects of having a huge user base and lots of visibility. I do think that Twitter's biggest asset are the network effects that it currently enjoys, but I don't think that it would be trivial to recreate what they've done in order to create a Twitter competitor. It's not insurmountable, but it's not trivial either. The original comment was clearly meant to trivialize the engineering. "One guy can do it in a weekend" is hyperbole, it's something you say when you're trying to communicate that anyone can do something in a relatively short amount of time. If there are a bunch of downvotes I would assume they're more for the hyperbole than people actually disagreeing with whether or not one weekend is enough time to write "non-scaling Twitter", which isn't specific enough for anyone to argue about how long it would take to do.
metaphorm 11y ago
Its a credible claim. Social media apps are a fairly basic kind of CRUD app, and if you forego the complex layers of privacy settings and permissions, monetization schemes, and scalability issues you end up with what amounts to a weekend project for an experienced developer. Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity. The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.
- davidcgl 11y ago
  I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.

paulpauper 11y ago

lol if it's so easy, I implore you to create a Twitter competitor... and to make your challenge easier, instead of it being worth $20 billion, we'll lower the bar to, say, $150 million. It's already been done..every major web 2.0 success has many clones that all tried but failed to gain the necessary momentum and marketshare to become as successful as Twitter or Dropbox, for example. Even Evernote, despite all the attention and funding it has gotten, is stuck in the ruts. Yes, the coding part can be replicated, but getting the users and traction is the hardest part.

richmarr 11y ago
kylebgorman posted that comment 2 hours ago, he must be half way done building his Twitter-but-better by now. I'm on the edge of my seat, I can tell you.
misiti3780 11y ago
to further your point (i think) app.net tried and failed build a competitor: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/app-net#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/app-net#/entity

jerrickhoang 11y ago

> There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects As a backend engineer, I feel offended by this statement of yours.

niccaluim 11y ago
They did say "non-scaling." Though that's a bit like saying any competent shipbuilder could build a non-floating boat.

curiousjorge 11y ago

I have to say that for Facebook as well. When the IPFS picks up, we'll have a distributed clone of twitter and facebook that runs on such architecture. There would be no desire or need for advertisement or money making or tracking people when there are no owners, no benefactors but the people using it. The end is nigh for traditional SV unicorns that offer no barrier to entry in a distributed and anonymous internet.

Xyik 11y ago

lol - so which features are you going to exclude? Is your weekend-twitter-app going to support a feed, favoriting / reteweeting only to your followers / dming only between followers / ability to block / filter / rate-limit users who tweet-spam / mobile app / push notifications / e-mails to new users who sign-up / and various other necessary features an app usually has before it even launches a MVP?

qq66 11y ago

Making a Twitter minus the scaling and network effects is like playing basketball minus dribbling or shooting.