13 ms·

Let Twitter Be Twitter

119 points by hangars 11y ago

chollida1 11y ago
The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the promise of being something other that just Twitter. Or to put it in analogy form. You give me $500,000 to buy you a Ferrari and I give you a Toyota Corolla. You complain that I haven't held up my end of the bargain and I point out that the Corolla is a perfectly fine car that can get you from point a to point b and even has some strengths when compared to the Ferrari, so why are you complaining? That's the point Twitter is at right now. They took the money to be something other than what they are right now. If Twitter wants to be just Twitter, that's fine, but you'll need to cut their 20 Billion market cap down to somewhere around a 3-4 Billion market cap, I don't have a model with me right now. having said that, Twitter has some good things going for it. - Mobile Advertising numbers are up Year over year - Data licensing revenue is up - monthly active users are up IMHO, twitter just needs to shrink in size or find a way to really start growing revenue. EDIT to the child comment, you are confusing revenue and earnings. There is a huge difference between the two:)
- Mimick 11y ago
  $569.2M of earnings on Q3, and you want it to be worth $3-4B? Why everyone ignoring the financial facts? I don't like or use Twitter/Vine/Medium. But those guys generate load of money even that it look like they don't...
  - strictnein 11y ago
    Not trying to nitpick, but wasn't it $569.2M of revenue, not earnings? I believe they lost $132M in Q3. > "In the third quarter, the company lost $132m, equivalent to 20 cents a share." http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/twitter-stock-drops-quarterly-results http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/twitter-st...
    - booruguru 11y ago
      > Not trying to nitpick... It's not nitpicking when correcting a meaningful mistake.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrweasel 11y ago
    >$569.2M of earnings on Q3, and you want it to be worth $3-4B? That's $569.2M in revenue, not profit.
- eykanal 11y ago
  This, exactly. Twitter could "just be twitter" if they were private. They made the choice, though, to go public, and now they have to answer to shareholders, whose needs are quite different from the needs of their users. The fact that they're under a lot of fire for "not being a good enough investment" is a problem of their own creation.
  - zobzu 11y ago
    The stock market is evil shit
    - thanatropism 11y ago
      That would be Capital. (Also, not really, really evil. I subscribe to the 1848 _Manifesto_ part 1, not parts 2,3 and 4) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
      - zobzu 11y ago
        totally evil enough for me to cal it evil. or capitalism if you want. i do not care what the words are, it still transforms good products into shitty products for the benefit of a few individuals. not saying something else is better, though. most things we came up with always end up evil due to the way humans pervert it, not due to the concept.
- jasode 11y ago
  It's interesting to compare the investment amounts into Twitter vs Google. Very different trajectories in how things actually turned out. (Boy would I love to see the 2011 Powerpoint deck shown to the Twitter investors in Round 7 & and Round 8 that convinced them to sink the additional $400 million & $300 million. It seems like there must have been some wildly optimistic projections in that presentation.) Twitter Inc: - +$1.0 billion from 8 rounds of funding pre-IPO [1] - +$1.8 billion raised from IPO [2] (sold 13% of the company) - ==== - +$2.8 billion total - -$511 million loss[3] in first post-IPO quarterly report Google Inc: - +~$1 million from angel investors (including Andy Bechtolsheim's famous $100k check) - + $25 million from Sequoia, KPCB - + $1.9 billion raised from IPO (sold 8% of the company) - +$66 million profit[4] in first post-IPO quarterly results (and would have been +$200 million if they didn't pay to settle Yahoo patents) - +$$$ millions in growing profits in subsequent years as we all know now [1] http://upstart.bizjournals.com/money/loot/2013/11/06/twitter-fundraising-rounds-infographic.html http://upstart.bizjournals.com/money/loot/2013/11/06/twitter... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-07/twitter-raises-1-82-billion-pricier-value-than-facebook http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-07/twitter-ra... [3] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=823321 https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=... [4] https://investor.google.com/earnings/2004/Q3_google_earnings.html https://investor.google.com/earnings/2004/Q3_google_earnings...
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    What really can a software company do with a billion dollars of investment nowadays? Where can it spend this much?
    - coke12 11y ago
      It's pretty easy to get numbers that big when you're Twitter's size. Salary and overhead (taxes, rent, food) for 1000 employees is probably on the order of $300-400m/year, and server costs for a high traffic site like Twitter is probably on the order of $100m/year.
      - marcosdumay 11y ago
- lucasarruda 11y ago
  The saddest thing about Twitter's path is that the tool is so good, but if they don't fix the problem you just described (brilliantly btw), they can be doomed.
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    Sure, the company may (or may not) be doomed, but the value provided by the product is here to stay. All it takes is a critical mass of users to migrate to a clone, (which I assume is very likely if the company were to fail).
    - GrinningFool 11y ago
      I think if something the size of twitter failed, the loss of trust in a similar service's sustainability would prevent a clone from seeing critical mass for a long time, if ever. edit: why the downvote? If you disagree, let's talk about it.
      - theseatoms 11y ago
        I hear your point, but what becomes the goto place for live events on the internet? Does a company with an established brand (like Google) attempt to step in with its own clone service? I just can't see this form going away. A public-by-default, one-to-many microblog service has proven to be valued by a substantial userbase. I have to think that the "next Twitter" could disguise itself as a sufficiently fresh take in order to gain enough trust from enough users. (I upvoted you, btw.)
        GrinningFool 11y ago
        There's always RSS and mailing lists :D Joking aside, I wish there were some meaningful numbers around how many people (as a percentage of active user base) use it that way (live events) vs just seeing what their friends and/or favorite celebrities have to say.
        gaius 11y ago
- gaius 11y ago
  $3Bn is still vastly overpriced. What's their P/E again? You can trade at a loss while you're flush with cash, but not forever, you have to grow your way out somehow...
  - cdf 11y ago
    You must think whatsapp acquisition is insane and fb ran by amateurs. The fact is Twitter is of great value to the likes of Google and fb, beyond simplistic pe ratios. In fact, pe is a very poor valuation tool for tech companies.
    - gaius 11y ago
      The true value of Google and FB remains to be seen too. You can't keep using your investor's capital in place of earnings forever.
mrweasel 11y ago
>The company’s revenue merely doubled last year, to $1.4 billion. Only 300 million people use Twitter every month. Apparently that isn’t enough. Nope, because there no profit to be found. Twitter is to old a company to not make any money. Investors either need to stock increase in value or be paid a dividend, otherwise why invest? Letting Twitter be Twitter clearly isn't making the investors any money, so of cause there's going to be suggestions to changes. At this point I think they should wait to see what Jack Dorsey does to be honest, and the article is written before he became permanent CEO.
empressplay 11y ago
I know this is going to be an unpopular view, but Twitter is a zombie. They've come, they've gone but they don't seem to know it yet. It's a case of scaling too far, before your revenue model can catch up with your size, I think.
- muzmath 11y ago
  It's unpopular because it's blatantly false. > As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307 million monthly active users. A zombie doesn't have 300 million active users.
  - riffic 11y ago
    Kinda like MySpace, yeah?
    - muzmath 11y ago
      MySpace wasn't a zombie while it was at the height of it's popularity. All zombies were once alive. I'm not arguing that it won't be a zombie, but that it currently isn't.
  - maxlamb 11y ago
    MySpace did at one point, and it was indeed a walking dead.
    - muzmath 11y ago
      MySpace wasn't a zombie while it was at the height of it's popularity. All zombies were once alive. I'm not arguing that it won't be a zombie, but that it currently isn't.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - gaius 11y ago
    Like Yahoo?
bovermyer 11y ago
This reminds me again of a problem I'm seeing on the Web. Every time a social network springs up, it seeks to "connect users" and "build communities." And every time it reaches critical mass, it tries to use its users as a product to be sold to advertisers. The only exception is Wikipedia, which the author of this article brings up, but as Wikipedia is more of a collaborative content platform than a social network I'll just relegate that to a tangential concern. Is it not possible to create a social network where the product is the social network? Perhaps not. App.net attempted this, and wasn't able to generate enough money to both keep the lights on and pay its employees. As someone who once founded a company that published game books, I'm acutely aware of the fact that people are rarely willing to buy content in this age of free information. So what, then, would make them willing to pay to be a part of a social network?
- m52go 11y ago
  I don't understand why there can't be a social network that simply charges its biggest beneficiaries. That is, make it free for every user until that user reaches a certain level of influence. That way, you can grow without charging anything and then charge those who a) value it the most and b) have the money & reason to pay to sustain their influence. Why can't Twitter create a pricing model for everyone with over 1m followers? Why can't Facebook keep its service free for consumers but charge organizations? The massive power of huge social followings (organic reach--without ads) is worth so much but valued at ZERO by social networks. I think it's a huge missed opportunity that is resulting in diminished value for everyone.
  - jamesjyu 11y ago
    "Why can't Facebook keep its service free for consumers but charge organizations" But that is exactly how Facebook works: they charge organizations money to reach relevant users. Users are never charged.
    - m52go 11y ago
      I was trying to say that organizations should be charged to be a part of Facebook, period. Whether they choose to advertise or not. In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any advertising on Facebook. Just billions of people using it for free, subsidized by companies that pay to be on it.
arbitrage314 11y ago
Twitter has certainly carved out a nice niche--I love real-time information from important people, news sources, etc. They will be around for a long time. Even so, I can't imagine them becoming more profitable any time soon. Still a short if I had to guess (which I typically try to avoid).
- kuschku 11y ago
  They didn’t really carve out anything – they just took over the niche that was RSS before.
ducuboy 11y ago
Besides the "Twitter as a business" discussion.. You guys here on Hacker News don't seem to fancy Twitter so much and I wonder why..
- ducuboy 11y ago
  Did I say something wrong? Why the down vote here?
  - doomspork 11y ago
    Likely because your original comment did not add value to the discussion and you're asking about downvotes. Both are mentioned in the Guidelines and FAQ.
    - ducuboy 11y ago
      Hey thanks, good to know. That's true, bad wording from my part, I was just trying to discuss Twitter as a service rather than Twitter as a business.
austenallred 11y ago
Twitter, in its current state, is a platform for power users. Twitter is a field you put some stuff in, and that stuff displays to everyone who follows you. Disregarding scale, the premise is very, very simple. The difficulty stems from knowing who or what to follow. It takes a long time to figure out who you want to follow, and Twitter doesn't have enough information about you to solve the cold start problem. I love Twitter because I'm constantly pruning my feed (and lists), and it's pretty great. My mom joined Twitter, followed who Twitter recommended, got a bunch of generic PR accounts and celebrities, and doesn't use it anymore. Conversely, when she joined Facebook all of her friends and family started adding her. Her feed was now full of the people she loves (the value was already there), and she learned to become a fully participating user. That's why Facebook has 1.5B monthly active users (holy shit!). She figured out how to use Facebook because the value was already there. She doesn't use Twitter because it's not. It's really that simple. So Twitter goes public saying, "Look, there are all these people using Twitter already, we can fix this problem for people, then we'll grow way quickly!" They start curating for you, and it turns out it's not what you want, and no one cares. Wall Street is pissed that it's not growing quickly enough, and everyone starts freaking out. What we're seeing is the freakout. Everyone trying to figure out how to "fix" Twitter. Everybody coming up with solutions. But no one has figured out the fundamental problem behind Twitter: You have to put a lot of effort in before you get any value out. There are only so many people in the world willing to do that. It will still grow, but it may not be rocketship growth. If you're private that's OK, but if you're public and you're not growing quickly enough you're going to get a lot of shit.
- ducuboy 11y ago
  Yes! Twitter requires too much work to be useful! Sorry for the plug, but this is exactly how http://svven.com http://svven.com can help. New user tweets a couple of links - gets other people that tweeted same links - and also the other links they tweeted. How's this for a solution?
  - Leynos 11y ago
    Just tried it. It makes me look incredibly boring. :( I just don't seem to tweet enough links to things that are actually interesting. Lesson learned.
rconti 11y ago
"I am 'on' Twitter (odd phrase). I’m not on Facebook; I don’t like the caged environment, with marketers and algorithms absorbing my information and distracting people with shiny objects." I've got bad news for the author....
kylestlb 11y ago
I definitely understand the fact that it's probably disappointing (?) to investors, but I'm confused when I hear it's dying. It's THE way to get realtime news on just about anything. It's my first go-to for sports, news, politics, even tech. The author hits it on the head; the 'vast confusion' of the timeline is kind of why I use it (and maybe why others do too).
- ducuboy 11y ago
  not sure that the 'vast confusion' is why people use it.. I think that this confusion is more the reason why adoption and retention are not that great. Besides this, I think Twitter is the most valuable social network to date, you just have to hack your way around it to make it useful.
  - kylestlb 11y ago
    What I mean is that I don't want it to be organized or filtered, like the author says. Having just one timeline with everything is nice.
    - ducuboy 11y ago
      Yes, if you have a lot of time on your hands..
    - theseatoms 11y ago
      There's room for both a "raw" feed and a "filtered" feed.
- cwyers 11y ago
  The problem is money. They took on a lot of investment. Investors want their money back. Meanwhile, running Twitter is expensive.
blakecallens 11y ago
People forget that Facebook was 8 figures into the black before they even took a Series A. The problem with Twitter isn't that they're a social network on par with Facebook, it's that they're not on par as a business, and never will be.
jdlyga 11y ago
Twitter is a fantastic tool for searching. If you want some information that's immediate or location based, such as if there's a Verizon FiOS outage, or a parade that you're trying to figure out the theme of (common in NYC), then Twitter is your go-to resource.
roymurdock 11y ago
Weird thought: I've seen some people on HN commenting on how the "responsibility" of funding R&D seems to be shifting (somewhat) from the public to the private sector. Surely this varies by industry (aerospace and defense is still hugely gov't funded) but it seems to be an increasing trend in the education, consumer goods, and healthcare sectors at least. Twitter is not very profitable, but it is useful. Try to make it profitable w/ ads and dumb changes to a service that was fine without it, and you'll make it less useful. It's like taking a park and putting billboards on all the trees. It would be interesting to see some sort of cost/benefit analysis from the gov perspective on whether or not to subsidize a public service like Twitter. We must do it for the large public energy companies we subsidize, why not for a network that (ostensibly) adds value to people's lives in a more abstract sort of way? If there was a compelling argument for putting our tax money towards Twitter rather than the DoD/NSA budget, I would at least be interested in hearing it. Unless we start to think longer term about investing (50-100 years, not 5-10), we will be missing out on a ton of great products and services that investors shoot down with silly short-term monetization schemes.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, in the case that the government starts funding private sector companies, it becomes an issue when they don’t get money back out either. So you’d have to do it like Germany, and the government would just have to buy at least 20% shares of all the big companies. Effectively leading to a higher tax rate without anyone losing anything.
- DarkTree 11y ago
  Subsidies are not just for services that benefit the public. They are used to both fund capital-intensive industries that our country relies on and to make our energy generation competitive globally. To compare the energy industry to a single company like Twitter, which provides a product that is not needed in any sense is pretty far-reaching. Energy utilities provide regulated returns that are very consistent. Who knows when Twitter won't be cool anymore.
- s_dev 11y ago
  I'd prefer to see public money go to projects that are more "ethically pure" than twitter like Wikipedia or a open source projects like Linux or one of the BSDs. If twitter receives public support we're protecting inefficiency -- it is already a profitable private company with a strong product -- if they can't figure out how to make it more relevant to future proof their growth then it deserves to fail -- another will take its place.
theseatoms 11y ago
Has there been any speculation that they'll roll out a Premium (read, "ad-free") monthly subscription format?
golemotron 11y ago
Maybe Twitter should recharter as a Public Benefit Corporation?
- criddell 11y ago
  Is there a way of doing that without gutting the company defending shareholder lawsuits?
  - falsestprophet 11y ago
    Yeah it doesn't really mean anything. Being a benefit corporation doesn't obligate the company to do materially reduce profits and in any case the company can choose to stop being a benefit corporation at any time.
codingdave 11y ago
I don't think the problem is that Twitter needs to re-invent itself or change what they are. It serves a purpose, some people use it well, and some people find value in it. Almost everyone who does see that value says exactly the same thing - curate your own feed, and it becomes a good tool. But then those same people say it is about teaching everyone else to do it the same way. But I am not sure that is true. Not everyone wants to see content in the same way. Just like not everyone read newspapers or watched TV news when they were dominant, people will have their own preferences. So the assumption that the market for Twitter is "Everyone on the internet." is flawed. It seems to me that Twitter has simply reached its market capacity. Their growth curve has flattened. But they have significant revenue. They need to stop trying to change the product to grow their market, and start simplifying their internal processes and decreasing costs. They need to serve their existing market even better, while spending less money. If they can do that, then they will move into the black, and start operating like a non-startup, which is not such a bad thing for a company that has been around for almost 10 years.
ballaa 11y ago
Twitter would do itself and its users much good if it focused on making its core service work better. Three example areas screaming for improvement: Search, discovery, and alternatives to timeline-based views

119 points by hangars 11y ago

The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the promise of being something other that just Twitter. Or to put it in analogy form. You give me $500,000 to buy you a Ferrari and I give you a Toyota Corolla. You complain that I haven't held up my end of the bargain and I point out that the Corolla is a perfectly fine car that can get you from point a to point b and even has some strengths when compared to the Ferrari, so why are you complaining? That's the point Twitter is at right now. They took the money to be something other than what they are right now. If Twitter wants to be just Twitter, that's fine, but you'll need to cut their 20 Billion market cap down to somewhere around a 3-4 Billion market cap, I don't have a model with me right now. having said that, Twitter has some good things going for it. - Mobile Advertising numbers are up Year over year - Data licensing revenue is up - monthly active users are up IMHO, twitter just needs to shrink in size or find a way to really start growing revenue. EDIT to the child comment, you are confusing revenue and earnings. There is a huge difference between the two:)

Mimick 11y ago
$569.2M of earnings on Q3, and you want it to be worth $3-4B? Why everyone ignoring the financial facts? I don't like or use Twitter/Vine/Medium. But those guys generate load of money even that it look like they don't...
- strictnein 11y ago
  Not trying to nitpick, but wasn't it $569.2M of revenue, not earnings? I believe they lost $132M in Q3. > "In the third quarter, the company lost $132m, equivalent to 20 cents a share." http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/twitter-stock-drops-quarterly-results http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/twitter-st...
  - booruguru 11y ago
    > Not trying to nitpick... It's not nitpicking when correcting a meaningful mistake.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mrweasel 11y ago
  >$569.2M of earnings on Q3, and you want it to be worth $3-4B? That's $569.2M in revenue, not profit.
eykanal 11y ago
This, exactly. Twitter could "just be twitter" if they were private. They made the choice, though, to go public, and now they have to answer to shareholders, whose needs are quite different from the needs of their users. The fact that they're under a lot of fire for "not being a good enough investment" is a problem of their own creation.
- zobzu 11y ago
  The stock market is evil shit
  - thanatropism 11y ago
    That would be Capital. (Also, not really, really evil. I subscribe to the 1848 _Manifesto_ part 1, not parts 2,3 and 4) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
    - zobzu 11y ago
      totally evil enough for me to cal it evil. or capitalism if you want. i do not care what the words are, it still transforms good products into shitty products for the benefit of a few individuals. not saying something else is better, though. most things we came up with always end up evil due to the way humans pervert it, not due to the concept.
jasode 11y ago
It's interesting to compare the investment amounts into Twitter vs Google. Very different trajectories in how things actually turned out. (Boy would I love to see the 2011 Powerpoint deck shown to the Twitter investors in Round 7 & and Round 8 that convinced them to sink the additional $400 million & $300 million. It seems like there must have been some wildly optimistic projections in that presentation.) Twitter Inc: - +$1.0 billion from 8 rounds of funding pre-IPO [1] - +$1.8 billion raised from IPO [2] (sold 13% of the company) - ==== - +$2.8 billion total - -$511 million loss[3] in first post-IPO quarterly report Google Inc: - +~$1 million from angel investors (including Andy Bechtolsheim's famous $100k check) - + $25 million from Sequoia, KPCB - + $1.9 billion raised from IPO (sold 8% of the company) - +$66 million profit[4] in first post-IPO quarterly results (and would have been +$200 million if they didn't pay to settle Yahoo patents) - +$$$ millions in growing profits in subsequent years as we all know now [1] http://upstart.bizjournals.com/money/loot/2013/11/06/twitter-fundraising-rounds-infographic.html http://upstart.bizjournals.com/money/loot/2013/11/06/twitter... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-07/twitter-raises-1-82-billion-pricier-value-than-facebook http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-07/twitter-ra... [3] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=823321 https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=... [4] https://investor.google.com/earnings/2004/Q3_google_earnings.html https://investor.google.com/earnings/2004/Q3_google_earnings...
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  What really can a software company do with a billion dollars of investment nowadays? Where can it spend this much?
  - coke12 11y ago
    It's pretty easy to get numbers that big when you're Twitter's size. Salary and overhead (taxes, rent, food) for 1000 employees is probably on the order of $300-400m/year, and server costs for a high traffic site like Twitter is probably on the order of $100m/year.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
lucasarruda 11y ago
The saddest thing about Twitter's path is that the tool is so good, but if they don't fix the problem you just described (brilliantly btw), they can be doomed.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  Sure, the company may (or may not) be doomed, but the value provided by the product is here to stay. All it takes is a critical mass of users to migrate to a clone, (which I assume is very likely if the company were to fail).
  - GrinningFool 11y ago
    I think if something the size of twitter failed, the loss of trust in a similar service's sustainability would prevent a clone from seeing critical mass for a long time, if ever. edit: why the downvote? If you disagree, let's talk about it.
    - theseatoms 11y ago
      I hear your point, but what becomes the goto place for live events on the internet? Does a company with an established brand (like Google) attempt to step in with its own clone service? I just can't see this form going away. A public-by-default, one-to-many microblog service has proven to be valued by a substantial userbase. I have to think that the "next Twitter" could disguise itself as a sufficiently fresh take in order to gain enough trust from enough users. (I upvoted you, btw.)
      - GrinningFool 11y ago
        There's always RSS and mailing lists :D Joking aside, I wish there were some meaningful numbers around how many people (as a percentage of active user base) use it that way (live events) vs just seeing what their friends and/or favorite celebrities have to say.
      - gaius 11y ago
gaius 11y ago
$3Bn is still vastly overpriced. What's their P/E again? You can trade at a loss while you're flush with cash, but not forever, you have to grow your way out somehow...
- cdf 11y ago
  You must think whatsapp acquisition is insane and fb ran by amateurs. The fact is Twitter is of great value to the likes of Google and fb, beyond simplistic pe ratios. In fact, pe is a very poor valuation tool for tech companies.
  - gaius 11y ago
    The true value of Google and FB remains to be seen too. You can't keep using your investor's capital in place of earnings forever.

mrweasel 11y ago

>The company’s revenue merely doubled last year, to $1.4 billion. Only 300 million people use Twitter every month. Apparently that isn’t enough. Nope, because there no profit to be found. Twitter is to old a company to not make any money. Investors either need to stock increase in value or be paid a dividend, otherwise why invest? Letting Twitter be Twitter clearly isn't making the investors any money, so of cause there's going to be suggestions to changes. At this point I think they should wait to see what Jack Dorsey does to be honest, and the article is written before he became permanent CEO.

empressplay 11y ago

I know this is going to be an unpopular view, but Twitter is a zombie. They've come, they've gone but they don't seem to know it yet. It's a case of scaling too far, before your revenue model can catch up with your size, I think.

muzmath 11y ago
It's unpopular because it's blatantly false. > As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307 million monthly active users. A zombie doesn't have 300 million active users.
- riffic 11y ago
  Kinda like MySpace, yeah?
  - muzmath 11y ago
    MySpace wasn't a zombie while it was at the height of it's popularity. All zombies were once alive. I'm not arguing that it won't be a zombie, but that it currently isn't.
- maxlamb 11y ago
  MySpace did at one point, and it was indeed a walking dead.
  - muzmath 11y ago
    MySpace wasn't a zombie while it was at the height of it's popularity. All zombies were once alive. I'm not arguing that it won't be a zombie, but that it currently isn't.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gaius 11y ago
  Like Yahoo?

bovermyer 11y ago

This reminds me again of a problem I'm seeing on the Web. Every time a social network springs up, it seeks to "connect users" and "build communities." And every time it reaches critical mass, it tries to use its users as a product to be sold to advertisers. The only exception is Wikipedia, which the author of this article brings up, but as Wikipedia is more of a collaborative content platform than a social network I'll just relegate that to a tangential concern. Is it not possible to create a social network where the product is the social network? Perhaps not. App.net attempted this, and wasn't able to generate enough money to both keep the lights on and pay its employees. As someone who once founded a company that published game books, I'm acutely aware of the fact that people are rarely willing to buy content in this age of free information. So what, then, would make them willing to pay to be a part of a social network?

m52go 11y ago
I don't understand why there can't be a social network that simply charges its biggest beneficiaries. That is, make it free for every user until that user reaches a certain level of influence. That way, you can grow without charging anything and then charge those who a) value it the most and b) have the money & reason to pay to sustain their influence. Why can't Twitter create a pricing model for everyone with over 1m followers? Why can't Facebook keep its service free for consumers but charge organizations? The massive power of huge social followings (organic reach--without ads) is worth so much but valued at ZERO by social networks. I think it's a huge missed opportunity that is resulting in diminished value for everyone.
- jamesjyu 11y ago
  "Why can't Facebook keep its service free for consumers but charge organizations" But that is exactly how Facebook works: they charge organizations money to reach relevant users. Users are never charged.
  - m52go 11y ago
    I was trying to say that organizations should be charged to be a part of Facebook, period. Whether they choose to advertise or not. In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any advertising on Facebook. Just billions of people using it for free, subsidized by companies that pay to be on it.

arbitrage314 11y ago

Twitter has certainly carved out a nice niche--I love real-time information from important people, news sources, etc. They will be around for a long time. Even so, I can't imagine them becoming more profitable any time soon. Still a short if I had to guess (which I typically try to avoid).

kuschku 11y ago
They didn’t really carve out anything – they just took over the niche that was RSS before.

ducuboy 11y ago

Besides the "Twitter as a business" discussion.. You guys here on Hacker News don't seem to fancy Twitter so much and I wonder why..

ducuboy 11y ago
Did I say something wrong? Why the down vote here?
- doomspork 11y ago
  Likely because your original comment did not add value to the discussion and you're asking about downvotes. Both are mentioned in the Guidelines and FAQ.
  - ducuboy 11y ago
    Hey thanks, good to know. That's true, bad wording from my part, I was just trying to discuss Twitter as a service rather than Twitter as a business.

austenallred 11y ago

Twitter, in its current state, is a platform for power users. Twitter is a field you put some stuff in, and that stuff displays to everyone who follows you. Disregarding scale, the premise is very, very simple. The difficulty stems from knowing who or what to follow. It takes a long time to figure out who you want to follow, and Twitter doesn't have enough information about you to solve the cold start problem. I love Twitter because I'm constantly pruning my feed (and lists), and it's pretty great. My mom joined Twitter, followed who Twitter recommended, got a bunch of generic PR accounts and celebrities, and doesn't use it anymore. Conversely, when she joined Facebook all of her friends and family started adding her. Her feed was now full of the people she loves (the value was already there), and she learned to become a fully participating user. That's why Facebook has 1.5B monthly active users (holy shit!). She figured out how to use Facebook because the value was already there. She doesn't use Twitter because it's not. It's really that simple. So Twitter goes public saying, "Look, there are all these people using Twitter already, we can fix this problem for people, then we'll grow way quickly!" They start curating for you, and it turns out it's not what you want, and no one cares. Wall Street is pissed that it's not growing quickly enough, and everyone starts freaking out. What we're seeing is the freakout. Everyone trying to figure out how to "fix" Twitter. Everybody coming up with solutions. But no one has figured out the fundamental problem behind Twitter: You have to put a lot of effort in before you get any value out. There are only so many people in the world willing to do that. It will still grow, but it may not be rocketship growth. If you're private that's OK, but if you're public and you're not growing quickly enough you're going to get a lot of shit.

ducuboy 11y ago
Yes! Twitter requires too much work to be useful! Sorry for the plug, but this is exactly how http://svven.com http://svven.com can help. New user tweets a couple of links - gets other people that tweeted same links - and also the other links they tweeted. How's this for a solution?
- Leynos 11y ago
  Just tried it. It makes me look incredibly boring. :( I just don't seem to tweet enough links to things that are actually interesting. Lesson learned.

rconti 11y ago

"I am 'on' Twitter (odd phrase). I’m not on Facebook; I don’t like the caged environment, with marketers and algorithms absorbing my information and distracting people with shiny objects." I've got bad news for the author....

kylestlb 11y ago

I definitely understand the fact that it's probably disappointing (?) to investors, but I'm confused when I hear it's dying. It's THE way to get realtime news on just about anything. It's my first go-to for sports, news, politics, even tech. The author hits it on the head; the 'vast confusion' of the timeline is kind of why I use it (and maybe why others do too).

ducuboy 11y ago
not sure that the 'vast confusion' is why people use it.. I think that this confusion is more the reason why adoption and retention are not that great. Besides this, I think Twitter is the most valuable social network to date, you just have to hack your way around it to make it useful.
- kylestlb 11y ago
  What I mean is that I don't want it to be organized or filtered, like the author says. Having just one timeline with everything is nice.
  - ducuboy 11y ago
    Yes, if you have a lot of time on your hands..
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    There's room for both a "raw" feed and a "filtered" feed.
cwyers 11y ago
The problem is money. They took on a lot of investment. Investors want their money back. Meanwhile, running Twitter is expensive.

blakecallens 11y ago

People forget that Facebook was 8 figures into the black before they even took a Series A. The problem with Twitter isn't that they're a social network on par with Facebook, it's that they're not on par as a business, and never will be.

jdlyga 11y ago

Twitter is a fantastic tool for searching. If you want some information that's immediate or location based, such as if there's a Verizon FiOS outage, or a parade that you're trying to figure out the theme of (common in NYC), then Twitter is your go-to resource.

roymurdock 11y ago

Weird thought: I've seen some people on HN commenting on how the "responsibility" of funding R&D seems to be shifting (somewhat) from the public to the private sector. Surely this varies by industry (aerospace and defense is still hugely gov't funded) but it seems to be an increasing trend in the education, consumer goods, and healthcare sectors at least. Twitter is not very profitable, but it is useful. Try to make it profitable w/ ads and dumb changes to a service that was fine without it, and you'll make it less useful. It's like taking a park and putting billboards on all the trees. It would be interesting to see some sort of cost/benefit analysis from the gov perspective on whether or not to subsidize a public service like Twitter. We must do it for the large public energy companies we subsidize, why not for a network that (ostensibly) adds value to people's lives in a more abstract sort of way? If there was a compelling argument for putting our tax money towards Twitter rather than the DoD/NSA budget, I would at least be interested in hearing it. Unless we start to think longer term about investing (50-100 years, not 5-10), we will be missing out on a ton of great products and services that investors shoot down with silly short-term monetization schemes.

kuschku 11y ago
Well, in the case that the government starts funding private sector companies, it becomes an issue when they don’t get money back out either. So you’d have to do it like Germany, and the government would just have to buy at least 20% shares of all the big companies. Effectively leading to a higher tax rate without anyone losing anything.
DarkTree 11y ago
Subsidies are not just for services that benefit the public. They are used to both fund capital-intensive industries that our country relies on and to make our energy generation competitive globally. To compare the energy industry to a single company like Twitter, which provides a product that is not needed in any sense is pretty far-reaching. Energy utilities provide regulated returns that are very consistent. Who knows when Twitter won't be cool anymore.
s_dev 11y ago
I'd prefer to see public money go to projects that are more "ethically pure" than twitter like Wikipedia or a open source projects like Linux or one of the BSDs. If twitter receives public support we're protecting inefficiency -- it is already a profitable private company with a strong product -- if they can't figure out how to make it more relevant to future proof their growth then it deserves to fail -- another will take its place.

theseatoms 11y ago

Has there been any speculation that they'll roll out a Premium (read, "ad-free") monthly subscription format?

golemotron 11y ago

Maybe Twitter should recharter as a Public Benefit Corporation?

criddell 11y ago
Is there a way of doing that without gutting the company defending shareholder lawsuits?
- falsestprophet 11y ago
  Yeah it doesn't really mean anything. Being a benefit corporation doesn't obligate the company to do materially reduce profits and in any case the company can choose to stop being a benefit corporation at any time.

codingdave 11y ago

I don't think the problem is that Twitter needs to re-invent itself or change what they are. It serves a purpose, some people use it well, and some people find value in it. Almost everyone who does see that value says exactly the same thing - curate your own feed, and it becomes a good tool. But then those same people say it is about teaching everyone else to do it the same way. But I am not sure that is true. Not everyone wants to see content in the same way. Just like not everyone read newspapers or watched TV news when they were dominant, people will have their own preferences. So the assumption that the market for Twitter is "Everyone on the internet." is flawed. It seems to me that Twitter has simply reached its market capacity. Their growth curve has flattened. But they have significant revenue. They need to stop trying to change the product to grow their market, and start simplifying their internal processes and decreasing costs. They need to serve their existing market even better, while spending less money. If they can do that, then they will move into the black, and start operating like a non-startup, which is not such a bad thing for a company that has been around for almost 10 years.

ballaa 11y ago

Twitter would do itself and its users much good if it focused on making its core service work better. Three example areas screaming for improvement: Search, discovery, and alternatives to timeline-based views