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This is a great comment. For most companies, grinding along and sometimes taking a hit, firing people, slow things down and then pick it up again and grow, is t
by fairpx 10y ago
This is a great comment. For most companies, grinding along and sometimes taking a hit, firing people, slow things down and then pick it up again and grow, is the norm. If every company that stops getting massive growth would stop, we wouldn't have factories mass producing our day to day products, the post office wouldn't be delivering us goods anymore, etc. twitter is a mature organisation. There are jobs. There is cashflow. We should stop letting journalists make a big deal of companies that don't have infinite growth and applaud the entrepreneurs that build the monster.
- forgingahead 10y agoThere is another angle that we often don't consider: who the media writes for. In general, the financial press writes for investors (this is the same for the tech media), and so their alarm bells and dire predictions are for investors, not necessarily about underlying fundamentals or facts of a business for everyone else.
- westurner 10y ago- Are these jounalists working for media companies that are competing for time? - If they are shareholders, they don't seem to be declaring their conflicts of interest. - For Twitter to respond would require that Twitter be taking editorial positions regarding the activities of competing media conglomerates. ("You're down, you should all just cash out now" [while you have far more daily active customers and revenue per user than a number of TV channels combined]. - Are there competing international interests and biases? Is the market for noiseless citizen media saturated? How much time is there, really?
- joemi 10y agoI'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but I think you're considering Twitter to be a media company, like a newspaper company? If so, I don't think that comparison is accurate so there'd be no conflict of interest really.
- briandear 10y agoThe conflict of interest is if the journalists owned shares of Twitter.
- westurner 10y agoThe conflict of interest is that one media company is publishing negative articles about another media company amidst acquisition talks. What is their interest here? How do they intend to affect the perceived value of Twitter? Are there sources cited? Data? Figures?
- joemi 10y agoI'm still a bit confused. Are you implying that Bloomberg and Twitter are in competition? I'm not so sure they are, really, in any sense.
- westurner 10y agoBloomberg is a private corporation which sells ads and exercises editorial discretion in publishing market-moving information and/or editorials. Twitter is a public corporation which hosts Tweets, sells ads, and selects trending Twitter Moments. Both companies are media services. Both companies compete for ad revenue. Both companies compete for readers' time. (Medium allows journalists to publish information and/or editorials for free (or, now, for subscription revenue from membership programs)).
- vtlynch 10y ago>We should stop letting journalists make a big deal of companies that don't have infinite growth Im not sure if thats the main audience pushing the narrative of growth. There is an industry that created the "growth hacker" position, and I dont think it was journalism.
- mc32 10y agoBut then the media could at least question those assertions along with the narrative.
- mastazi 10y ago> There is an industry that created the "growth hacker" position, and I dont think it was journalism True but it seems that most journalists were keen to embrace that credo. At the end of the day, "hockey-stick growth" has become the predominant narrative; does it matter much where it came from initially?