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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
- allsystemsgo 11y agoI'm sad for my friends at Twitter but, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
- gcampos 11y agoIs indeed sad for the people that are let go, but at least the market is hot and they will probably find new jobs soon.
- muzz 11y agoThat is true if the layoff is specific to Twitter and not a harbinger of a general downturn
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThere is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?
- kkhire 11y agoWhat makes you say that? Last I saw they had great revenue/were filing for IPO. Just wondering.
- beagle3 11y agoTwitter has great revenue too. It's the profit that's problematic.
- lern_too_spel 11y agoProfit is not a problem as long as you have growth. Twitter doesn't have that, and neither does Square.
- superuser2 11y agoSquare has a clear business model, i.e. transaction commissions. I don't think it's particularly comparable to Twitter.
- adevine 11y agoYeah, honestly I'd think it were sad if they were, say, manufacturing employees who were laid off and had poor prospects, but in today's market any decent engineer or product person who worked at Twitter would be snapped up in a second.
- swingbridge 11y agoA sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment. Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.
- wyclif 11y agoYes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.
- swingbridge 11y agoOh I agree, I didn't say I thought the company was going bust... just saying that this is likely the start of a lot more focus on the hard numbers of tech companies and less focus on hype-based valuation (although the later isn't going to disappear entirely). Just that question a a lot of startups hate "So how are you going to make money?" is likely going to start getting asked a lot more.
- tedks 11y agoYes, it's sad for employees let go, but it's good news for AOL. I don't think AOL is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jonathan might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.
- Ao7bei3s 11y agoNothing inspires fighting spirit like layoffs.
- jalfresi 11y agoWhat utter tosh! Layoffs just inspires the remaining staff to update their CV and start looking around. Layoff are the result of incompetent management, and nobody wants to work for a company staffed with incompetent managers.
- werber 11y agoI don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?
- stephengoodwin 11y agoConsidering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to news, I doubt it. Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.
- werber 11y agoDo you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just couldn't.
- xienze 11y agoWish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the appropriate way to use the service.
- servercobra 11y ago@pmarca is famous for his multipart "tweet storms". Lots of others have followed suit (not sure if he started the trend, but was the first one I saw doing it).
- mindcrime 11y agoBeing a big sports fan (#phinsup) I find that I get breaking news first on Twitter. Player signings, coaches being hired (#dancampbell) and fired (#firephilbin), etc. I also find a lot of interesting links on Twitter, that are things I wouldn't necessarily have found otherwise, because they're from sites that weren't necessarily always on my radar.
- nickalekhine 11y ago
- calcsam 11y agoThis is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading. Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly -- usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price. Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates. This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a "considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-share-vs-expected-eps-of-4-cents.html http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-...
- jarsin 11y agoTwitter is suppose to be a growth company. Layoffs and downsizing are not what growth investors want to see. Thats why it went down.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoI suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, and so on. The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Companies, and their revenue, don't necessarily scale the way we're used to from the experience of industrial companies.
- kordless 11y agoThey turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
- xienze 11y ago4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
- menzoic 11y agothats a naive assumption, there could be a lot of hidden scaling issues when you think deeper about how it works
- xienze 11y agoI don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
- werber 11y agoIt's crazy that it makes sense a billion+ company would need that few people now
- swingbridge 11y agoWell a lot of other people are saying "It's crazy that a company with that few people and that little profit can be worth that many billions." Hence Twitter's problem at the moment.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoSomewhat curious if this is the beginning of the unicorn pop.
- eclipxe 11y agoYes, it is.
- 11y ago
- pinaceae 11y agofinally. completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth. all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc. i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.
- biggest_lou 11y agoDo you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary. > lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin) As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.
- 27182818284 11y agoI have to jump in and side with the grandparent. Despite everything you just mentioned, if it isn't about "tweets and ads" I would contest that it is exactly about them. Do whatever you want back-end, but that doesn't matter if my front-end experience is not so great. For example, they are terrible with spam bots. I mean when super-model-quality photos suddenly follow me, and the bot is posting shortened URLs, it makes me feel like they aren't on the ball at all.
- dmritard96 11y agorise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.
- thebigkick 11y agoWould you care to explain the cockroaches metaphor? I'm confused.
- gaius 11y agoCockroaches can survive extremely hostile environments that more "advanced" creatures cannot. They might not be pretty like unicorns, but they are extremely well adapted to resource-poor environments.
- pavornyoh 11y ago@dmritard96, care to elaborate a bit on your post?
- dmritard96 11y agosure. There was what seems to be a correction in the PE market where funding become a bit more difficult to get a hold of. As such, an article came out suggesting that unicorns would have problems but cockroaches would survive. While the unicorn portion is a bit silly, the cockroach part is reasonable. Essentially, the companies with low burn rates and actual, real, cashflow will be more likely to survive.
- pavornyoh 11y ago@Dmritard96, thanks for clarifying:).
- hlfcoding 11y agoThat's truly surprising. I don't recall Facebook ever resorting to layoffs?
- sloanesturz 11y agoFacebook's never been in as bad a spot as Twitter's in now.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoYet.
- addicted 11y agoFacebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark. And they are already reporting profits. I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoNothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me profits from those users if you want to count them.
- muzz 11y agoTrue, but thus far Facebook has responded well to existential threats by buying companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
- Apocryphon 11y agoIs that how it works now? Companies with great products but not a sustainable long-term biz plan exit by getting bought out, and larger companies with a greater product but also no far-long-term biz plan buy those companies and survive by having them as fallback products?
- mckiddy 11y agoThe second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone
- bdcravens 11y agoNot necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)
- goodcjw2 11y agoMaybe judging a boom by twitter layoff is a bit too soon. However, the underneath mindset rings a bell: people starts to realize winter is coming, but not sure when...
- bdcravens 11y agoDefinitely. Now, if you're an evangelist who hasn't written production code in years, then maybe you should start brushing up on your skills :-)
- biggest_lou 11y agoUm, no. The OSS evangelism team is three people total.
- bdcravens 11y agoFor many businesses, that might be 2 or 3 too many. Also, that was just an example I pulled out of the air. It could be middle management, or a documentation expert whose role is regulating font size. The point is that for a company with a simple product, an API and clients for that API, and monetization through advertising, that's a lot of employees. If the money's not there, cut the fat.
- lolive 11y agoI used to be a Google Reader/Google Buzz addict. And was interacting with a very living community through those tools. I now use twitter as my exclusive medium for both mainstream and "niche" news. I appreciate the wide availability of content, but still think they are much too conservative with their user experience. The inability to browse tweets by topic is sometimes a pain. The inability to connect with the right people and build a discussion about topics you discover and find interesting. Basically twitter should have a chatroom. And propose you conversations about (your) trending topics.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoSo a more public/global Slack with recommendations and intelligently aggregating channels by hash tag?
- LoSboccacc 11y agothe limitation of which is that most content on a user stream is pulled passively by the users or is a paid advertisement. as a discovery/exploration tool sucks. if it had interesting suggestion based on hashtags and followers beyond 'follow this three more person' daily mail it could be a nice networking/news tool, but so far it cannot really help me navigate in the millions streams that might be interesting but are accessible only knowing that exact hashtag I followed a couple news outlet, I guess there are many more that may interest me but I can't be assed to search them and if I discover them myself they go by preference into feedly, not twitter. on the other hand, it had been great to follow this and that indie game developer :D
- cpeterso 11y agoGoogle Reader got so much right, except maybe feed discovery. Google could have incrementally morphed Reader, something that worked. Twitter is like RSS for regular people.
- jimmayyy 11y agoAnd yet no one avail to fix the mobile Twitter website. It just does not work. Get enraged everytime I click on a tweet from Safari.
- Sexagesimal 11y agoThis what happens when you create a company around a glorified public majordomo public email list manager and virtuous feedback loop used by the media. I'm looking for the Google and companies that invent real tech.
- Ganz7 11y agoJust because you don't derive utility from a product doesn't mean it's not 'real' tech. Twitter is basically the news medium for me and most of my friends at school. I cannot remember the last time I went to read a news article from a site other than (mostly) twitter.
- dghughes 11y ago> A Twitter spokesman declined to comment. That made me giggle. Their entire existence is communication.
- ForHackernews 11y agoMaybe it's finally dawning on investors that nobody wants to pay money for #sarcastic #selfpromoting #hottakes #mixingcontentandmetadata
- finance-geek 11y agoI would not go that far, but I can certainly say -- seems like half the accounts are re-tweet bots and random products I have no interest in trying to follow me.
- whitenoice 11y agoGenuine question - why do recruiters hire new people when the company is laying off?
- JSno 11y agobecause new employees worker harder and get paid less. old employees are getting lazier and less productive
- JSno 11y agobecause new employees worker harder and get paid less. old employees are getting lazier and less productive
- thrownaway2424 11y agoLazier and more productive, you mean.
- pavornyoh 11y ago@Whitenoice, recruiters hire them mainly because of their skill set. Keep in mind, most layoffs are because a department is being eliminated and the is no where for the employee to go but to take a severance and leave. Not their fault they are being laid off you know.
- tikhonj 11y agoThey don't always, but I can think of a few reasons why they would: - they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut - at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average - they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs - they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.
- finance-geek 11y agoThis is a good list. Two more reasons: - Corporations are inefficient, sometimes the HR department is not even aware layoffs are coming - Corporations are sometimes unethical, they don't care about the unfairness of hiring a new worker rather than trying to re-place a worker about to be laid off
- nosuchthing 11y ago"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants. Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.
- bhc3 11y agoHow do you mean? I think of Moments are formalizing something that Twitter does well: conversations/stories around topics of current interest. Sure, you'll engage your connections on these topics. But it's nice to see a broader view of them as well.
- nosuchthing 11y agoChecking it showed no relation to anything in my feed, friends, or posts. Additionally it brought up nonsense click bait. It looked like they just fed in the front page of yahoo.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoCompletely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at? At least that makes the most sense to me... Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!
- volaski 11y agoit's because you're not their target. Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.
- 11y ago
- andhofmt 11y agoI'm surprised it took so long. Hopefully the other social-networking giants follow suite and we start getting more companies that have actual sustainable business models.
- mrmondo 11y agoI see this as a good sign (other than for those laid off of course), Twitter is fantastic but they don't need half as many people as they currently employ for their product. As companies get larger their agility and ability to change decreases. What's important is if they're laying off the right people.
- paulomartins 11y agoI think it's a good moment for Twitter to get back in track, Moment is a great feature and it shows that more good stuff is coming.
- mvc 11y agoHas someone told their recruiting team? My twitter feed today was about 30% "join the flock" tweets.
- gaius 11y agoGuess they didn't get the tweet about cover sheets on the TPS report.
- twistedpair 11y agoI got an email from a Twtr recruiter two days ago and now am trying to word my polite reply that now doesn't look like the best time to be quitting a good job to join a company that's in the middle of layoffs. I guess they didn't get the word.
- DrFunke 11y agoOh god. My roommate was literally offered a position at their Boulder office last week. I wonder how systemic cuts will be?
- 1dayitwillmake 11y ago...I heard they're gonna fire 140 characters
- Tinyyy 11y agoThere's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".
- scrollaway 11y agoOr, in the case of Twitter, both.
- beagle3 11y agoNote that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not. Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream. Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
- eggie 11y agoAnd now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in /etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my laptop does just as well with a plugin. All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism. The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit. > Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads. The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to. Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
- antirez 11y agoSo it is possible the ceo switch happened now since the board was willing to reduce company size, instead of the other way around? I can imagine markets to take it better if this appears to be the first wise move of a very capable ceo.
- antirez 11y agoSo it is possible the ceo switch happened now since the board was willing to reduce company size, instead of the other way around? I can imagine markets to take it better if this appears to be the first wise move of a very capable ceo.
- pmontra 11y agoNon paywalled article at http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning-company-wide-layoffs-for-next-week/ http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning-company-wid...
- beefman 11y agoThis sort of thing can happen when society insists on building multi-billion-dollar businesses around stuff that should have been an RFC. On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more with a founder at the helm, of course.
- on_ 11y agoTwitter is undervalued, Jack Doresey can't run two stagnating companies in parrallel. Cut jobs, merge the companies (because Square's IPO isn't going to be successful and combine core competencies. Square has been focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among others[0] Strip these companies down to core competencies: * Communications * Real time information broadcasting * Financial infrastructure * Global penetration * Advertisers/Brands/Companies Not PG's What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?", but "What Apple is this the Ipod of?"* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter, I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with: * both sides of the market in one place * financial infrastructure * customer tracking * brand participation. Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels. Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon. [0]http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/ http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/
- meeper16 11y agoIn the public markets, you announce your bad news after the market closes on a Friday. If this were good news, it would have been announced on a Monday, Tuesday or Wenesday and before the market opens.
- simonswords82 11y agoNot happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made. Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value. Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information. If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.
- eggie 11y agoI find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.
- simonswords82 11y agoTotally. People keep talking about removing the 140 character limit. That's just one of the many UX problems they need to address.
- PuffinBlue 11y agoYou're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone. For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username. Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them. This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see. They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.
- amix 11y agoI think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.
- Al-Khwarizmi 11y agoThe new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years... I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.
- amix 11y agoI am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid. Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
- collyw 11y agoI bought an Ubuntu phone, and here its the netwok effect that stops my friends switching to Telegram or anything else.
- batrat 11y ago"Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.
- 11y ago
- TheBlueDot 11y agoWell, there goes my weekend/week. As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-( To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will be layoffs, people panic and worry like all 4000+ employees are doing now. Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/
- TheBlueDot 11y agoAlso, it's amusing yet disturbing the disconnect. Just three days before this leak everyone was told we're doing well, we're going to grow and hire more people and build these great new things. They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O
- tragic 11y ago> They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know about it on the shop floor probably did. But they didn't tell us ... presumably because it would get leaked. Which it, of course, did anyway. It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons. My feeling about Twitter is that there was an opportunity to seriously monetise it around the moment it started getting serious traction for PR. The celebs had given it critical mass, and Coke and McDonalds had to follow. Now, however, the shills are basically just given an enormous amount of free advertising space with a not-great premium option on top of that. (A promoted tweet is not as good as an embedded tweet in a 'proper' news outlet, which will be part of the PR package, sold together to a client as advertising-equivalent exposure.) They could still do something like start charging per tweet per thousand followers for content promoting a specific product or service (a made up back-of-the-fag-packet example, I'm sure there are better ways), of course, but it would be much harder given the expectations that have built up around what the platform is. EDIT: clarity
- tajano 11y agoI predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002). To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast. But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.
- zer0defex 11y ago"I predicted..." really? with a link to your comment even? hahahahaha, you're so proud of yourself for repeating what's said here every hour of every day, it's amazing. do you act this way in RL?
- donohoe 11y agoDo be fair, only part of the prediction was right at best.
- dang 11y agoYour comments have been breaking the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do that repeatedly. Please comment civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- twistedpair 11y agoBut how many engineers if they were still on Ruby? Perhaps they can drop Scala for Erlang and get down to 100 engineers?
- irascible 11y agoOh.. Twitter who lobbied the crooked mayor of SF, Ed Lee, to kick the Chess Players out of Market and Powell? HOW THE WORM TURNS.
- kelseydh 11y agoThey kicked chess players out of Market and Powell? As a chess fan this interests me. Please link me to more info.
- anjc 11y agoI wonder if this will have an effect on private equity for startups immediately, and have an effect on what some see as a VC bubble. Twitter was often hailed as an example of a company that didn't need - not just profit - even a monetisation strategy, because growth! Ads! User data! You're the product! It's becoming more obvious that this may be a hollow way to speculate about returns.
- 3dfan 11y agoIs it true that they will - to further cut down costs - also limit the number of characters per tweet to 72?
- ilaksh 11y agoIts not about Twitter. The whole economy is shrinking because people have taken the idea of sustainability to heart. Our economic system needs revision to be able to handle a non-growth mode.
- csense 11y ago> costs and expenses totaled $633 million WTF do they spend that much money on?
- ehudla 11y agoDo they have 20% time?
- roguecoder 11y agoNope.
- iamleppert 11y agoHonestly, this is really bad news for Twitter. A tech company is all about finding and retaining top technical talent. That's what enables you to "build fast teams that learn even faster". As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better workers.
- loceng 11y agoWhen the creators of Bootstrap framework left Twitter, I took that as a bad sign. Creative people easily get bored and need to challenges. With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - even though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.
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- lkrubner 11y agoWhen Twitter got going, RSS was marred by political infighting: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-... And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps. But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making. But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.
- thom 11y agoTwitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could have been won, though.
- lkrubner 11y agoContent discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an api account, they asked that you write to their sales team. I wrote to their sales team at least a dozen times, and I tracked down the personal email address of the CEO, but no one ever responded to me. I was convinced then that they could have made a lot of money if they had made it easier for developers like me to give them money. But they made it impossible. And now it seems they gave up on RSS aggregation. They seem to be in a different business now: http://technorati.com/ http://technorati.com/
- curiousjorge 11y agoScaling twitter is fucking overrated if you look at the work engineers at WhatsApp did. There's a reason why a whatsapp engineer is worth 100 more than the average twitter engineer. The twitter tears are flowing in this thread
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