11 ms·

There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Twitter is forever judged by Faceboo

There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. Nevermind that the average high profile tweet is much more culturally significant than the averge high profile Facebook post. Heck most of Facebook isn't even original content, it's just really slick distribution for content from elsewhere. Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. But, Twitter has cracked public discourse in a way that no other company has period. Think about it, all previous internet fora have imploded as they've grown large, or collapsed into micro-communities like sub-reddits. Twitter has definitely faced challenges with trolling and witch-hunts, etc, but by and large they've put together a super interesting product. The only problem is that it's not going to displace Facebook because it's a different thing that's not quite as big. This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. It's just a really sad statement on modern business culture that Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers.

forgetsusername 10y ago
>There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Those institutions are equally responsible for the historical hype Twitter has received. >This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. This isn't the fault of anyone but Twitter management. No one forced them to take outside investment or go public. When you do that, investors want a return. If that isn't in your plan, and you want full creative control, don't take the money. >by and large they've put together a super interesting product. I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline, making it difficult to read streams chronologically. I haven't opened the app for months. It's too bad, because I agree, it was a great product and my goto aggregator.
- krat0sprakhar 10y ago
  > I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline FWIW, in the iOS app (at least) you can turn this feature off from the settings menu.
- dasil003 10y ago
  I agree, Twitter's management definitely has to take the blame here. It was their responsibility to manage the narrative, and I remember early on all the rumors of management squabbles. It's clear that those inside the company who wanted to build a cool dev platform lost out to those with dollar signs in their eyes who wanted to go for a moonshot. I can't help but feel there was a third path which is to say: we've now outgrown our free-for-all dev roots, and we need to standardize the experience so we can improve it unilaterally, but let's do so with the acknowledgement that we have something special, something which may be worth more than 10x growth or 100x growth achieved by a tremendous cash burn. Obviously hindsight is 20/20, so I can't hold it against them too strongly, but it still really makes me sad.
mgkimsal 10y ago
at core, I think it's because twitter was 'public first', with some notions of private communication grafted on later (DM, etc). But the first and primary purpose of twitter is short form public posting. Many other platforms all try for social/friends/community first (or exclusively) and end having built-in limits. No one worries if a tweet is seen by the 'wrong' people - it's meant to be seen by everybody. Facebook is the opposite - private/groups/friends first/only, with some notion of 'public' visibility after the fact.
- Camillo 10y ago
  > No one worries if a tweet is seen by the 'wrong' people But they do: see the constant kvetching about "randos in my mentions".
foolfoolz 10y ago
sure twitter is allowed to be a success and i wouldnt call a 13B market cap medium sized. but in 2 years as a public company it's stock has only ended up below its ipo price, so pretty fair to say they've had trouble. i agree twitter has introduced a form of communication that probably isnt going anywhere, but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi.
- cshenoy 10y ago
  > ...but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi. That's absurd. I've seen numerous articles in online entertainment media sites (e.g. People, US Mag, TMZ, Buzzfeed) that are solely made up of embedded tweets. CNN and MSNBC (and even Fox News) reference tweets all the time. Maybe Twitter as a company has failed to monetize the platform properly and shareholders have taken a loss but to downplay Twitter's cultural impact seems largely misguided.
  - bhandziuk 10y ago
    This is a joke, right? All those "articles" which are just quoting tweets are worthless. All that does is speak to the laziness of CNN and MSNBC.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      The point is that they work at attracting pageviews. Pageviews from members of the culture.
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  But it's where you can see news before it's on the news. As a politics junkie (even in the UK) this is the prime reason I've always spent much more time on twitter than on facebook or any other social network (which are, you know, too social). I have recently stopped using twitter because it was becoming too much on an addiction. I went back for a few days around Brexit, but I've not been back since. If I want to follow a political story in real time in the future though, I know where I'll go.
jasode 10y ago
>Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. No, the criticism is more fundamental than that. The problem is that Twitter has taken ~$2.8 billion of investors' money and has never made a profit.[1] Any comparisons to Facebook regarding audience size or engagement is way down the list of priorities compared to the basic task of not losing millions every single quarter. [1]http://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-...
- unprepare 10y ago
  >The problem is that Twitter has taken ~$2.8 billion of investors' money and has never made a profit. I see this type of thing all the time about various companies, i really dont understand the thinking behind it. Why is it Twitter's fault that people handed them 2.8 billion dollars? The investors were the ones who created the terms of the agreement, they wrote the check - how could it possibly be anyone but their fault that their investment didn't work out? If i bet on 33 black and lose a hundred bucks - is it because 33 black did something wrong?
  - jasode 10y ago
    >Why is it Twitter's fault that people handed them 2.8 billion dollars? It's not about "fault" as if it's some kind of moral argument. E.g. When the Twitter founders asked Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to invest an additional $300 million in 2011[1], they had a set of revenue & profit projections to convince him to write that check. Obviously, their financial predictions didn't happen. Therefore, Twitter is judged harshly for not delivering. The parent poster framed Twitter's criticism in terms of "Facebook envy". Instead, we should just look at the real underlying problem: Twitter has never made any money. It's ok to be a much smaller company than Facebook if you're making profits and/or growing. Twitter doesn't seem to have an obvious path to profits. They also are not growing. Linkedin is making profits. Snapchat is growing; it's reportedly losing money but at least it's still growing. Both are smaller companies than Facebook and yet they don't get the doom and gloom writings from the press. [1]http://pitchbook.com/news/articles/twitter-goes-public-hatching-the-nest-egg http://pitchbook.com/news/articles/twitter-goes-public-hatch...
swingbridge 10y ago
Twitter is being judged negatively by the business community and elsewhere because, simply, it's a terrible business that's losing money hand over fist. I consistently fail to understand why the present company isn't just 75 people in a basement somewhere. If that was the case they'd be raking in cash and Twitter would be considered a smashing success.
- Xyik 10y ago
  Because running the ads team at Twitter alone would take 75 people.
  - lisper 10y ago
    Not if they implemented something like AdWords.
  - nateberkopec 10y ago
    Snapchat is a pretty good comparable for Twitter's business model and employs less than a tenth of the employees, according to Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2015/08/11/the-most-valuable-employees-snapchat-doubles-facebook/#5a2c7104f754 http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2015/08/11/the-most-va...
  - koolba 10y ago
    > Because running the ads team at Twitter alone would take 75 people. Then make it 150 people. 75 for tech and 75 for ad sales. Right now it's something like 3500-4000 people working there. What do they do? I think WhatsApp had something like 50-60 employees around the time they got acquired by Facebook. Sure the request/response ratios are different (few publishers, lots of subscribers), but at the end of the day I don't understand how you can have, literally, thousands of people to run something like that.
    - hinkley 10y ago
      The little bits of the funding process that I've been able to observe tell me that you can get a round of funding on hype, but if you can't get it on hype then the investors tend to demand a better burn rate from the company. Or at least that's always the story I've heard right before the startup I or a friend worked at started making big changes. It's entirely plausible at this point that the next time they go for more cash, they'll have to lay off 10% of their workforce to make their financials look more appealing.
cft 10y ago
It's interesting how nowadays a founder of a public company could become a cash billionaire with his company always losing money. This was not possible even 50 years ago, at least not typical.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Not just in the dotcom business: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atla... Although I think "take the money and stiff the investors" has a rather long history, all the way back to the invention of the joint-stock company.
- rajeshp1986 10y ago
  Very interesting point. The investors and the general public loose their money. where is all the money going? In the end the only party in profit is the founders & CEOs and top management. I guess everybody in the top management realizes that they will be doomed and everyone just focuses their energy on developing personal assets.
  - chetanahuja 10y ago
    "In the end the only party in profit is the founders & CEOs and top management." Well... this includes everybody who had vested twitter stock after they went public and had strike price lower than sellable stock price (outside of any lockdown periods etc.). Twitter's stock price was doing pretty well during 2014. I'd bet at least 100's of early employees had significant cashout opportunities.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
Who. Cares. Twitter is supposed to be a business to its investors. Anyone can make a Twitter clone that can do exactly what you say, e.g. host provocative Trump tweets. This is not a 'technology' company. It's an online sounding board. A good one at that, that can make some ad money, but let's not pretend this thing should be worth so much.
inputcoffee 10y ago
Yeah it is like criticizing newspapers for not selling as much paper as notebook manufacturers.
rm999 10y ago
You're addressing like 10% of the article. The article lays out tons of issues, including: 1. Shrinking product - this isn't about comparing to facebook, it's about comparing to 2015 twitter. 2. Unhappy employees - especially high turnover at the top, which is universally a bad sign. 3. Unhappy users - users spending way less time on twitter. 4. Unhappy investors - stock price is wayyy down. 5. Happy competitors - a lot of the "cultural significance" is moving to instagram, snapchat, and others. Twitter isn't a successful medium sized company, it's a large company that is in trouble. Maybe it will become a successful medium sized company one day, but that process will be painful for a lot of people.
- pmontra 10y ago
  It's not so bad to survive as a service for news and press releases. You can't do that very well on Instagram and definitely not on Snapchat. It means Twitter is going to shrink (points 1 to 4) but it will keep paying salaries. Not world domination but still a success.
  - bronson 10y ago
    > Not world domination but still a success. Not to current and past Twitter investors. They expected a lot more.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
      Such is life. Some Epictetus or Boethius salve on their wounds, and they'll be alright.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Isn't Twitter quite unprofitable? They may have raised money to be able to pay salaries but that's hardly a business, right?
  - AJ007 10y ago
    They are losing money, so may be not. Both pieces of their business model, advertising and users, strongly benefit or hurt because of network effects. As the network shrinks, the value does not drop linearly. This is an assault from both sides. Because Twitter's growth is now definitely flat and likely is shrinking this is pretty bad. While you can't do X or Y on Instagram or Snapchat now doesn't mean you won't in the future. Clearly both took a big chunk of Twitter's users. Tweeting pictures was previously a large use case. So was tweeting and sharing things with friends. That you can create a video of what happened rather than typing it out isn't necessarily a different product or use case. In terms of news - FB, Google, Apple are all going after that market hard right now. The mass use case for Twitter probably made this sub use case look bigger than it was - news and instant events. Things could still change, but it is hard to see Twitter out-innovating their problems when they no longer have the social tail winds pushing them forward. And at some point the cash is going to matter a lot too. Does it make a lot of sense for someone with a lot of users to buy Twitter and try to revamp it? Plausibly, but the brand damage definitely has been done with the growth demographics. That is kind of the mistake Myspace's acquirers have made. At some point a brand goes from valuable to doing just the opposite. I bought Twitter shares and ended up selling them all once this settled in. There still probably is a threshold where an executive that is looking for value vs growth tries to acquire and you can arbitrage the difference. Unfortunately the bulk of Twitter's remaining value is probably going to be realized by there competitors as a case study for the survivors - FB/IG, Snapchat, and future players.
cloudjacker 10y ago
I looked at Twitter, they make bank. It is a viable business and platform. It has a 13 billion market cap that is difficult to defend. When it trades at a 3 billion market cap and $1.80 per share on the other hand, it'll still be a success story making money hand over fist. Its the existing shareholders they are worried about.
lazzlazzlazz 10y ago
Is there any evidence for this claim that a Tweet has more "cultural significance" than a Facebook post with objectively higher engagement? I think this illusion comes about because the media prefers to use Tweets as the minimum unit of cultural exchange, so Twitter receives attention as the medium in which these exchanges take place - even though it isn't, really.
- _yvjs 10y ago
  Here's one discussion that I don't think could have taken place on another social network: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/771434850863583233 https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/771434850863583233. There a lot of people I follow on Twitter who value their anonymity, like https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus, and being able to see them debate others real-time about issues of substance is valuable to me. Some other examples of recent, useful tweets: https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/775038793376231424 https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/775038793376231424 https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/685580497859252224 https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/685580497859252224 Twitter encourages interactivity in way that Facebook does not (though that might have more to due with the existing userbase than the UX), and it's text-focused in a way that Instagram, Snapchat, etc., are not.
  - johnfjacobi 10y ago
    Why do you think that conversation couldn't have happened on another social network? Specifically, I find that the character limit always makes any actual discussion very hard on twitter. Anything deeper than pop culture and I don't have enough space.
    - _yvjs 10y ago
      Facebook is a walled garden w/ no anonymity. Privacy (specifically, most posts are only seen by friends of poster) can be good but it can also stifle discussion. Google Plus might have been good (and got some notable adoption among academics initially) but could never accumulate enough of a network for a variety of reasons. Reddit actually has a lot going for it for these purposes, but doesn't work well for "personal brand" building, so doesn't get much uptake among experts. Other social networks I can think of are mostly focused on sharing pictures and experiences among close friends.
abysmallyideal 10y ago
It seems like neither company solved the social dilemma of popularity contests and influence, nor appears to have a desire to do so. On these platforms, their users have to compete against a well funded media campaign of celebrities, media orgs, etc... even for their own family and friends' attention. It is a really absurd level of engagement. edit: The way American tech companies have approached the social evolution and communication via internet is centered around their propaganda influence and reach. In every respect, they have insinuated themselves into the communicative aspects of the "users" by introducing subversive practices, manipulation, surveillance and the continued active threat of loss of privacy to very adversarial actors. It's just completely absurd.
- nhaliday 10y ago
  They need to make money somehow. It's not a public service.
  - odbol_ 10y ago
    Maybe it should be a public service though. Would be nice to see IPFS tackle this in a distributed, uncensorable manner, or maybe some kind of Torrent-based Twitter.
    - Tiksi 10y ago
      So usenet with a 140 char limit? Edit: misread IPFS as ISPs, ignore me.
    - wyclif 10y ago
      My theory is just that: it should have been a public service. But no, we can't do that! Everything has to be "monetized" in startup land, meaning it must have an unstoppable growth curve. Nobody wants a nice service that is functional and deeply imbedded in cultural discourse, like a version of IRC that your Mom knows about. There are lots of companies like Twitter, in the sense that they are probably not going to be the next Facebook. But Twitter is also unique, and IMO, more socially weighty than Facebook.
marme 10y ago
Think about this where have the most controversial comments from Trump come from in the past few months? Almost all of them have come from twitter. Twitter is were people go to make daily comments and air their thoughts and plans to the world. It is much different than facebook and instagram where people share their life experiences and things that already happend
gdulli 10y ago
> Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs > Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers I feel like it was Twitter, not the press, that decided to get rid of the things that made it unique and decided to be a forever 2nd-place Facebook clone. Twitter lost me when it got rid of the chronological feed and decided it was better than I am at deciding what I want to see and whether others should see what I post.
- arkadiyt 10y ago
  FWIW the timeline is only ranked when you were away for an extended period of time - when you haven't been away you get regular, chronological tweets. You can also opt out of the ranking and be fully chronological.
- curried_haskell 10y ago
  With 3,800 employees Twitter is a medium-sized company?
omarforgotpwd 10y ago
Completely agree. There is undeniably enormous value in Twitter and it's so important it's not going away. So what if they haven't figured out how to make money off it yet? They will.
aerovistae 10y ago
> Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. It's the chat feature. It's the only thing that keeps me on facebook and I suspect I'm not alone. I rarely hear it talked about and I think it's underappreciated that facebook chat replaced AIM. That's a big deal.
sfifs 10y ago
Well the simple answer Twitter is judged harshly is because they're losing a lot of money and Facebook or Google isn't. Sometimes that is ok if the company grows but it apparently isn't. I have always wondered why Twitter bothers with trying to make money with advertising rather than commercializing their value offered to press, PR, the rich and famous. There's pretty much no other platform now that's as uniquely suited to mass PR, why not commercialize that directly? I also think that the user growth issue may have something to do with the platform's unique suitability to PR. Perhaps there's limited percentage of population that wants or has the ability to engage in witty one liner public discussion.

forgetsusername 10y ago

>There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Those institutions are equally responsible for the historical hype Twitter has received. >This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. This isn't the fault of anyone but Twitter management. No one forced them to take outside investment or go public. When you do that, investors want a return. If that isn't in your plan, and you want full creative control, don't take the money. >by and large they've put together a super interesting product. I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline, making it difficult to read streams chronologically. I haven't opened the app for months. It's too bad, because I agree, it was a great product and my goto aggregator.

krat0sprakhar 10y ago
> I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline FWIW, in the iOS app (at least) you can turn this feature off from the settings menu.
dasil003 10y ago
I agree, Twitter's management definitely has to take the blame here. It was their responsibility to manage the narrative, and I remember early on all the rumors of management squabbles. It's clear that those inside the company who wanted to build a cool dev platform lost out to those with dollar signs in their eyes who wanted to go for a moonshot. I can't help but feel there was a third path which is to say: we've now outgrown our free-for-all dev roots, and we need to standardize the experience so we can improve it unilaterally, but let's do so with the acknowledgement that we have something special, something which may be worth more than 10x growth or 100x growth achieved by a tremendous cash burn. Obviously hindsight is 20/20, so I can't hold it against them too strongly, but it still really makes me sad.

mgkimsal 10y ago

at core, I think it's because twitter was 'public first', with some notions of private communication grafted on later (DM, etc). But the first and primary purpose of twitter is short form public posting. Many other platforms all try for social/friends/community first (or exclusively) and end having built-in limits. No one worries if a tweet is seen by the 'wrong' people - it's meant to be seen by everybody. Facebook is the opposite - private/groups/friends first/only, with some notion of 'public' visibility after the fact.

Camillo 10y ago
> No one worries if a tweet is seen by the 'wrong' people But they do: see the constant kvetching about "randos in my mentions".

foolfoolz 10y ago

sure twitter is allowed to be a success and i wouldnt call a 13B market cap medium sized. but in 2 years as a public company it's stock has only ended up below its ipo price, so pretty fair to say they've had trouble. i agree twitter has introduced a form of communication that probably isnt going anywhere, but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi.

cshenoy 10y ago
> ...but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi. That's absurd. I've seen numerous articles in online entertainment media sites (e.g. People, US Mag, TMZ, Buzzfeed) that are solely made up of embedded tweets. CNN and MSNBC (and even Fox News) reference tweets all the time. Maybe Twitter as a company has failed to monetize the platform properly and shareholders have taken a loss but to downplay Twitter's cultural impact seems largely misguided.
- bhandziuk 10y ago
  This is a joke, right? All those "articles" which are just quoting tweets are worthless. All that does is speak to the laziness of CNN and MSNBC.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    The point is that they work at attracting pageviews. Pageviews from members of the culture.
tehwalrus 10y ago
But it's where you can see news before it's on the news. As a politics junkie (even in the UK) this is the prime reason I've always spent much more time on twitter than on facebook or any other social network (which are, you know, too social). I have recently stopped using twitter because it was becoming too much on an addiction. I went back for a few days around Brexit, but I've not been back since. If I want to follow a political story in real time in the future though, I know where I'll go.

jasode 10y ago

>Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. No, the criticism is more fundamental than that. The problem is that Twitter has taken ~$2.8 billion of investors' money and has never made a profit.[1] Any comparisons to Facebook regarding audience size or engagement is way down the list of priorities compared to the basic task of not losing millions every single quarter. [1]http://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-...

unprepare 10y ago
>The problem is that Twitter has taken ~$2.8 billion of investors' money and has never made a profit. I see this type of thing all the time about various companies, i really dont understand the thinking behind it. Why is it Twitter's fault that people handed them 2.8 billion dollars? The investors were the ones who created the terms of the agreement, they wrote the check - how could it possibly be anyone but their fault that their investment didn't work out? If i bet on 33 black and lose a hundred bucks - is it because 33 black did something wrong?
- jasode 10y ago
  >Why is it Twitter's fault that people handed them 2.8 billion dollars? It's not about "fault" as if it's some kind of moral argument. E.g. When the Twitter founders asked Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to invest an additional $300 million in 2011[1], they had a set of revenue & profit projections to convince him to write that check. Obviously, their financial predictions didn't happen. Therefore, Twitter is judged harshly for not delivering. The parent poster framed Twitter's criticism in terms of "Facebook envy". Instead, we should just look at the real underlying problem: Twitter has never made any money. It's ok to be a much smaller company than Facebook if you're making profits and/or growing. Twitter doesn't seem to have an obvious path to profits. They also are not growing. Linkedin is making profits. Snapchat is growing; it's reportedly losing money but at least it's still growing. Both are smaller companies than Facebook and yet they don't get the doom and gloom writings from the press. [1]http://pitchbook.com/news/articles/twitter-goes-public-hatching-the-nest-egg http://pitchbook.com/news/articles/twitter-goes-public-hatch...

swingbridge 10y ago

Twitter is being judged negatively by the business community and elsewhere because, simply, it's a terrible business that's losing money hand over fist. I consistently fail to understand why the present company isn't just 75 people in a basement somewhere. If that was the case they'd be raking in cash and Twitter would be considered a smashing success.

Xyik 10y ago
Because running the ads team at Twitter alone would take 75 people.
- lisper 10y ago
  Not if they implemented something like AdWords.
- nateberkopec 10y ago
  Snapchat is a pretty good comparable for Twitter's business model and employs less than a tenth of the employees, according to Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2015/08/11/the-most-valuable-employees-snapchat-doubles-facebook/#5a2c7104f754 http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2015/08/11/the-most-va...
- koolba 10y ago
  > Because running the ads team at Twitter alone would take 75 people. Then make it 150 people. 75 for tech and 75 for ad sales. Right now it's something like 3500-4000 people working there. What do they do? I think WhatsApp had something like 50-60 employees around the time they got acquired by Facebook. Sure the request/response ratios are different (few publishers, lots of subscribers), but at the end of the day I don't understand how you can have, literally, thousands of people to run something like that.
  - hinkley 10y ago
    The little bits of the funding process that I've been able to observe tell me that you can get a round of funding on hype, but if you can't get it on hype then the investors tend to demand a better burn rate from the company. Or at least that's always the story I've heard right before the startup I or a friend worked at started making big changes. It's entirely plausible at this point that the next time they go for more cash, they'll have to lay off 10% of their workforce to make their financials look more appealing.

cft 10y ago

It's interesting how nowadays a founder of a public company could become a cash billionaire with his company always losing money. This was not possible even 50 years ago, at least not typical.

pjc50 10y ago
Not just in the dotcom business: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atla... Although I think "take the money and stiff the investors" has a rather long history, all the way back to the invention of the joint-stock company.
rajeshp1986 10y ago
Very interesting point. The investors and the general public loose their money. where is all the money going? In the end the only party in profit is the founders & CEOs and top management. I guess everybody in the top management realizes that they will be doomed and everyone just focuses their energy on developing personal assets.
- chetanahuja 10y ago
  "In the end the only party in profit is the founders & CEOs and top management." Well... this includes everybody who had vested twitter stock after they went public and had strike price lower than sellable stock price (outside of any lockdown periods etc.). Twitter's stock price was doing pretty well during 2014. I'd bet at least 100's of early employees had significant cashout opportunities.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

zxcvvcxz 10y ago

Who. Cares. Twitter is supposed to be a business to its investors. Anyone can make a Twitter clone that can do exactly what you say, e.g. host provocative Trump tweets. This is not a 'technology' company. It's an online sounding board. A good one at that, that can make some ad money, but let's not pretend this thing should be worth so much.

inputcoffee 10y ago

Yeah it is like criticizing newspapers for not selling as much paper as notebook manufacturers.

rm999 10y ago

You're addressing like 10% of the article. The article lays out tons of issues, including: 1. Shrinking product - this isn't about comparing to facebook, it's about comparing to 2015 twitter. 2. Unhappy employees - especially high turnover at the top, which is universally a bad sign. 3. Unhappy users - users spending way less time on twitter. 4. Unhappy investors - stock price is wayyy down. 5. Happy competitors - a lot of the "cultural significance" is moving to instagram, snapchat, and others. Twitter isn't a successful medium sized company, it's a large company that is in trouble. Maybe it will become a successful medium sized company one day, but that process will be painful for a lot of people.

pmontra 10y ago
It's not so bad to survive as a service for news and press releases. You can't do that very well on Instagram and definitely not on Snapchat. It means Twitter is going to shrink (points 1 to 4) but it will keep paying salaries. Not world domination but still a success.
- bronson 10y ago
  > Not world domination but still a success. Not to current and past Twitter investors. They expected a lot more.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    Such is life. Some Epictetus or Boethius salve on their wounds, and they'll be alright.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Isn't Twitter quite unprofitable? They may have raised money to be able to pay salaries but that's hardly a business, right?
- AJ007 10y ago
  They are losing money, so may be not. Both pieces of their business model, advertising and users, strongly benefit or hurt because of network effects. As the network shrinks, the value does not drop linearly. This is an assault from both sides. Because Twitter's growth is now definitely flat and likely is shrinking this is pretty bad. While you can't do X or Y on Instagram or Snapchat now doesn't mean you won't in the future. Clearly both took a big chunk of Twitter's users. Tweeting pictures was previously a large use case. So was tweeting and sharing things with friends. That you can create a video of what happened rather than typing it out isn't necessarily a different product or use case. In terms of news - FB, Google, Apple are all going after that market hard right now. The mass use case for Twitter probably made this sub use case look bigger than it was - news and instant events. Things could still change, but it is hard to see Twitter out-innovating their problems when they no longer have the social tail winds pushing them forward. And at some point the cash is going to matter a lot too. Does it make a lot of sense for someone with a lot of users to buy Twitter and try to revamp it? Plausibly, but the brand damage definitely has been done with the growth demographics. That is kind of the mistake Myspace's acquirers have made. At some point a brand goes from valuable to doing just the opposite. I bought Twitter shares and ended up selling them all once this settled in. There still probably is a threshold where an executive that is looking for value vs growth tries to acquire and you can arbitrage the difference. Unfortunately the bulk of Twitter's remaining value is probably going to be realized by there competitors as a case study for the survivors - FB/IG, Snapchat, and future players.

cloudjacker 10y ago

I looked at Twitter, they make bank. It is a viable business and platform. It has a 13 billion market cap that is difficult to defend. When it trades at a 3 billion market cap and $1.80 per share on the other hand, it'll still be a success story making money hand over fist. Its the existing shareholders they are worried about.

lazzlazzlazz 10y ago

Is there any evidence for this claim that a Tweet has more "cultural significance" than a Facebook post with objectively higher engagement? I think this illusion comes about because the media prefers to use Tweets as the minimum unit of cultural exchange, so Twitter receives attention as the medium in which these exchanges take place - even though it isn't, really.

_yvjs 10y ago
Here's one discussion that I don't think could have taken place on another social network: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/771434850863583233 https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/771434850863583233. There a lot of people I follow on Twitter who value their anonymity, like https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus, and being able to see them debate others real-time about issues of substance is valuable to me. Some other examples of recent, useful tweets: https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/775038793376231424 https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/775038793376231424 https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/685580497859252224 https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/685580497859252224 Twitter encourages interactivity in way that Facebook does not (though that might have more to due with the existing userbase than the UX), and it's text-focused in a way that Instagram, Snapchat, etc., are not.
- johnfjacobi 10y ago
  Why do you think that conversation couldn't have happened on another social network? Specifically, I find that the character limit always makes any actual discussion very hard on twitter. Anything deeper than pop culture and I don't have enough space.
  - _yvjs 10y ago
    Facebook is a walled garden w/ no anonymity. Privacy (specifically, most posts are only seen by friends of poster) can be good but it can also stifle discussion. Google Plus might have been good (and got some notable adoption among academics initially) but could never accumulate enough of a network for a variety of reasons. Reddit actually has a lot going for it for these purposes, but doesn't work well for "personal brand" building, so doesn't get much uptake among experts. Other social networks I can think of are mostly focused on sharing pictures and experiences among close friends.

abysmallyideal 10y ago

It seems like neither company solved the social dilemma of popularity contests and influence, nor appears to have a desire to do so. On these platforms, their users have to compete against a well funded media campaign of celebrities, media orgs, etc... even for their own family and friends' attention. It is a really absurd level of engagement. edit: The way American tech companies have approached the social evolution and communication via internet is centered around their propaganda influence and reach. In every respect, they have insinuated themselves into the communicative aspects of the "users" by introducing subversive practices, manipulation, surveillance and the continued active threat of loss of privacy to very adversarial actors. It's just completely absurd.

nhaliday 10y ago
They need to make money somehow. It's not a public service.
- odbol_ 10y ago
  Maybe it should be a public service though. Would be nice to see IPFS tackle this in a distributed, uncensorable manner, or maybe some kind of Torrent-based Twitter.
  - Tiksi 10y ago
    So usenet with a 140 char limit? Edit: misread IPFS as ISPs, ignore me.
  - wyclif 10y ago
    My theory is just that: it should have been a public service. But no, we can't do that! Everything has to be "monetized" in startup land, meaning it must have an unstoppable growth curve. Nobody wants a nice service that is functional and deeply imbedded in cultural discourse, like a version of IRC that your Mom knows about. There are lots of companies like Twitter, in the sense that they are probably not going to be the next Facebook. But Twitter is also unique, and IMO, more socially weighty than Facebook.

marme 10y ago

Think about this where have the most controversial comments from Trump come from in the past few months? Almost all of them have come from twitter. Twitter is were people go to make daily comments and air their thoughts and plans to the world. It is much different than facebook and instagram where people share their life experiences and things that already happend

gdulli 10y ago

> Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs > Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers I feel like it was Twitter, not the press, that decided to get rid of the things that made it unique and decided to be a forever 2nd-place Facebook clone. Twitter lost me when it got rid of the chronological feed and decided it was better than I am at deciding what I want to see and whether others should see what I post.

arkadiyt 10y ago
FWIW the timeline is only ranked when you were away for an extended period of time - when you haven't been away you get regular, chronological tweets. You can also opt out of the ranking and be fully chronological.
curried_haskell 10y ago
With 3,800 employees Twitter is a medium-sized company?

omarforgotpwd 10y ago

Completely agree. There is undeniably enormous value in Twitter and it's so important it's not going away. So what if they haven't figured out how to make money off it yet? They will.

aerovistae 10y ago

> Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. It's the chat feature. It's the only thing that keeps me on facebook and I suspect I'm not alone. I rarely hear it talked about and I think it's underappreciated that facebook chat replaced AIM. That's a big deal.

sfifs 10y ago

Well the simple answer Twitter is judged harshly is because they're losing a lot of money and Facebook or Google isn't. Sometimes that is ok if the company grows but it apparently isn't. I have always wondered why Twitter bothers with trying to make money with advertising rather than commercializing their value offered to press, PR, the rich and famous. There's pretty much no other platform now that's as uniquely suited to mass PR, why not commercialize that directly? I also think that the user growth issue may have something to do with the platform's unique suitability to PR. Perhaps there's limited percentage of population that wants or has the ability to engage in witty one liner public discussion.