17 ms·

Measuring how bad Twitter is

129 points by nikcub 10y ago

arama471 10y ago
For anyone as confused as I was as to why the conclusion is 'inescapable', he seems to actually explain things in the previous blog post[1] and this one appears to just be an additional tidbit on top of that. [1]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-buyout-rumours.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...
- max_ 10y ago
  It's the unofficial of "Jack Dorsey is fired!"
- martin_bech 10y ago
  That article is spot on. It highlights the problems of the experience, and how insane the burn rate is, for something thats no doing anything new for users.
gjolund 10y ago
Been watching this train wreck in slow motion for years. This has been a long time coming and I am positioned to profit from it.
- max_ 10y ago
  Are you shorting or going long? Cause stuff is unpredictable!
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Shorting.
    - happyslobro 10y ago
      Plot twist: he's actually hoping everyone else shorts, so that he can buy and go long ;)
      - gjolund 10y ago
        And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids!
    - roymurdock 10y ago
      If you read the author's (good) previous post on Twitter, you'll notice this at the end: "Twitter revenue is still rising and is running about $2.5 billion per annum. It is a website that once ran extremely well on less than $250 million in costs. (No I am not joking.) If you can't make this have a 40 percent operating margin then - frankly you are inadequately brutal. Personally I think 50 percent is possible. At this market cap that works extremely well for a financial buyer. Its a no-brainer even. So expect it to be bought. By some Wall Street bastard armed with a lot of debt. And that bastard will fire a lot of people. If I worked at Twitter I would be preparing my resume and providing a list of really quick things that can be done to improve the user experience - with the code all mapped out. That largely involves getting rid of spam bots and the like. But unless it radically improves the user experience or monetisation and you can convince the new owners you can implement then you are out. And the fashion-obsessed philosopher king. He is out too whether there is a buyer or not. That is necessary to save the company. John PS. Long for the takeout which I see as inevitable."
twblalock 10y ago
I suspect the lack of management focus is causing all of the waste. All of this investment in video, the various API services Twitter created and then discontinued, working on various Scala frameworks, probably a lot of internal data analysis tools, tweaks to the timeline format that nobody seemed to want... I just don't think a lot of what Twitter is doing is necessary to running a core business. The problem is that they don't have a core business -- they have several factions pushing competing visions of a core business and none of them can gain the upper hand. They need to decide what their core business is and focus on it. If you look at their list of active users, it's really something a lot of companies would kill for: almost every major politician, journalist, and celebrity in the US, and a similar presence in several other countries. It's just amazing that they can't figure out how to make a profit serving that kind of user base. I should add that aside from the exceptional success of Steve Jobs at Apple, bringing a founder back to run the company is not a very good sign.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It wouldn't be surprising if the timeline stuff comes down to measured engagement going up while a modest number of vocal users make noise about change being bad.
- calinet6 10y ago
  I think that their focus has been on the experience for advertisers, which are less visible or feel negative to the end user (such as tweaks to the timeline—100% for advertisers and brands). However, those choices are probably highly influential to their revenue, and arguably they need to be working more on those things—which means even fewer visible changes that benefit end users. Either they're working on the wrong thing, or they're not working hard enough on the right thing. I don't see too much of a split focus—they know the base they have and they need to extract value while keeping the essence of the experience they have.
- eldavido 10y ago
  Interesting how this is an example of "societies crumble when their elites want to go in different directions". I agree that lack of focus is a big problem and wonder what those competing 2-3 visions are. I think Jack came back because he/the investors thought he was the only person with the political clout, or moral authority, to whip people into line behind him, and get the company moving in one direction
emdowling 10y ago
This (and the original post[0]) sum up how I feel about Twitter. Every few months (since joining in 2009), I jump on and attempt to curate my feed to only get stuff I care about. I stick around for a few weeks, then get overwhelmed by the deluge. So I constantly curate and trim and it all becomes very tiresome. I want Twitter to be a feed of news and opinions from organisations and people I care about, but it is far too hard to jump in and see how a conversation started or evolved. It is far too hard to filter out the noise. Honestly, my RSS feeds give me everything I need and they've been going strong for over 10 years. Sprinkle in a bit of Apple News to fill in the blanks and Twitter quickly finds itself in the "too hard" basket. The financial state of Twitter highlighted by this article is mind-blowing. How on earth have costs crept up so much with no meaningful improvement in product? As a very astute tech-savvy person, I cannot see anything that Twitter has done in years that have made it better. That stands in stark contrast to Facebook. I'm sad about this because Twitter has been such an integral part of the modern internet, in democratising information. It's role in the Arab Spring alone was world-changing. It's a pity it hasn't been able to harness this. [0]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-buyout-rumours.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The Arab Spring thing is hyperbole to the hilt. If anything, Facebook and Twitter acted as pacifiers. While people could use them, they stayed inside rather than get involved in the streets. Only when the authorities cut the connection did shit hit the fan, as the masses ventured outside to keep up what was happening. Thinking about it, i suspect Twitter was an artifact of the US mobile market. It provided a way to do mass texts at a low cost. But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to exist kinda evaporated. On top of that they had basically handed the task of innovating over to third parties via their APIs. I still recall seeing people use Tweetdeck on desktop Windows with multiple columns set up on different topics, hashtags, and people during large events. This to allow them to track the full breath of what was happening at a glance. Crazy thing is that Twitter did integrate the "column" concept into their service, via lists. But neither their site nor their apps allow us to access those lists in any way similar to Tweetdeck. In contrast, most third party clients will support a column view these days.
sushid 10y ago
Why does he believe that only one in three employees will be keeping a job post-acquisition? Not that the engineers will have to worry. They have a very talented engineering team that will be sought out by every headhunter if that's the case but it all seems baseless.
- ryhamz 10y ago
  Twitter is going to switch into maintenance rather than growth mode. You don't need as many engineers to do that. If they cut their operating costs down, they might actually make money. Those that leave, by choice or not, will go on to build up other places that don't yet have their product.
  - overcast 10y ago
    From my perspective, Twitter has been in maintenance mode for years. What significant changes have been made that requires thousands of engineers? I'm being serious here. The interface is still the same clunky mess, the home page has been rearranged a few times, and now we have even more convoluted rules as to what counts towards your 140 character limit.
    - elmin 10y ago
      Yet they've managed to massively raise their r&d expenses.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  >They have a very talented engineering team Do they? What have they been doing all these years? As a user the product just seems to get worse and worse for me and despite the massive dev team they actually outsourced the mac client...
  - calinet6 10y ago
    They haven't been building things for you. They've been building things for advertisers.
Tomrn 10y ago
favourite line from the article - "the plural of anecdote is data" nice.
- leephillips 10y ago
  Yes, very clever - but also, by now, a venerable quip.
- afandian 10y ago
  I was going to reply "you realise that 'the plural of anecdote is not data' is the usual phrasing" so I spent a few seconds searching. According to this blog, the original doesn't include the 'not': http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-not-data.html http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-an... Funny how subverted phrases can supplant the original.
justinlardinois 10y ago
Anyone else get tripped up when the underlined "He simply does not deserve the job" turned out to not be a link?
- staticelf 10y ago
  Yes, I didn't understand the article so this was the only thing I thought about.
alex_hitchins 10y ago
Have they ever tried to charge to follow certain accounts? Say someone popular has 1m followers, all new followers would need to pay a subscription fee to receive all their tweets. It's a bit like the old CelebIndex. The more followers someone has they more the tweets cost. I'm thinking something like 1 or 2 pence per tweet. This is probably a terrible idea.
- rco8786 10y ago
  This would have bankrupted Ken Bone's grandmother overnight.
- coev 10y ago
  A celeb/politician/etc's popularity is what brings regular people to twitter. To charge the celeb would be counterproductive and probably move them over to a competitor for good.
  - alex_hitchins 10y ago
    Sorry - I meant that it would cost general users say 50P a month to receive tweets from say a major A-lister, but 25p to recieve the tweets of a C-lister. People could get them for free, just delayed by say 30 minutes.
0xmohit 10y ago
Not being a Twitter user myself, it's hard to comment on how it is. However, a number of their open source projects [0] are really really good. [0] https://github.com/twitter/ https://github.com/twitter/
nailer 10y ago
> When Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue it had $1.008 billion of income before taxes. > Twitter is kind of different. > When Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses before tax. For a UK based site, the English here is incredibly poor. The first sentence implies a comparison to when Twitter had a similar level of revenue. Making sense of it: > Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue and $1.008 billion of income before taxes. > Twitter is kind of different. > Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses before tax.
- davidivadavid 10y ago
  If you want to keep the parallel structure you would want to compare Twitter's revenue and their income (loss) before tax, just like he did for Facebook. That tripped me up too.
throw2016 10y ago
The 'arab spring' is nothing but the US and other vested interests stirring up trouble in these countries. Revolution does not happen by itself. It takes money, effort and organization to get otherwise passive citizens to raise their head above the parapet and more often than not it's to futher the organizers interests. Libya before and Libya now is a perfect example of a complete disaster for the people and another crime against humanity. Saudi Arabia, the most repressive regime in the region and chief promoter of terrorist ideology and the one place that requires a 'spring' is the western world's best friend in the region and remains 'strangely' but predictably untouched by the 'arab spring'. This is just unadulterated propaganda. We have far too many of these 'springs' repeated over and over again in the last 100 years to know what's happening and the modus-operandi and yet every story on facebook and twitter naively persist in rehashing this propaganda. These interventions under the cover of 'human rights' are always to further some agenda and given the massive upheaval and suffering they cause to populations its difficult to see how any believer in humanity can't continue to support these blatantly self serving actions.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > Revolution does not happen by itself I actually think revolution needs to happen by itself. The overlap between the skills needed to organise armed insurrection and to govern are similar. Issues come up when still-formentig revolutions are prematurely encouraged. They may succeed in toppling the prior regime, but they never forged a shared identity and set of norms fit for rallying, organising and deploying force and order - the bread and butter of nascent governance.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  The US generally didn't even support the Arab Spring, and actively worked against it in Egypt, a country with nearly as tight a relationship with the US as Saudi Arabia, that receives nearly as much military aid from the US as Israel. Everything is so much more complicated than you're making it out to be here.
raverbashing 10y ago
800Mi in R&D for Twitter? Almost the same figure for sales & marketing? Really, what are they doing? This makes no sense OK, Apple is @ 10Bi per year approximately http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-spending-jumps-to-25b-in-q2-accounted-for-5-of-total-revenue http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-spending-... (but developing hardware and silicon is not cheap
- mathattack 10y ago
  R&D is a fuzzy bucket. A lot of ongoing maintenance can wind up there. (Improves the optics on unit economics)
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  Also good to take a look at how the Apple R&D figure has developed: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273006/apple-expenses-for-research-and-development/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273006/apple-expenses-fo... Take for example 2010. R&D was less than $2Bi, but they already had iPhone 4, iPods, maintained two operating systems and bunch of other software, had the desktop line, two laptops lines and launched iPad.
- jondubois 10y ago
  Yes it's crazy; if you add up R&D + Sales, the total is $1.6B; their revenue is only $2.2B... And that's without factoring in the costs of simply keeping the business running - They still need to pay datacenter costs and salaries related to the ongoing maintenance of the site. When you look at the billions of R&D dollars which were spent over the past few years, you have to wonder where all the money went. I can't remember the last time Twitter released an innovative product... If ever. It's not like they were spending their R&D on high-risk ventures like finding a cure for cancer or building a quantum computer. With the kind of R&D they do, you expect to see results at reasonable intervals... I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of fraud going on.
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Twitters manipulation of this election cycle will cost them large swathes of users in the long run. You cant set yourself up as a communication utility and then get so involved in politics, it is bad for business.
- ihsw 10y ago
  That would be the result of the Trust and Safety Council. https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-safety-council https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s... https://about.twitter.com/safety/council https://about.twitter.com/safety/council The roster of members is notably liberal-leaning and partisan across the board. But you are correct, it's clear they make no effort to maintain an impartial and fair platform.
shawnee_ 10y ago
Twitter is the classic example of waiting too long to IPO. I understand there's a sort of cultish wisdom to delay an IPO for as long as (legally) possible; however, the underlying sustainability of a business either "just works" or it doesn't. The problems that plague Twitter today could and probably should have been caught at least a couple years before it IPO'ed at the very end of 2013. IPO'ing in the public exchange basically teases out sustainability problems. And regardless of what you think of American capitalism, the public markets are the best available detectives we have to investigate sustainability problems. When sustainability is iffy, owners of the company get their vote, and then they get to implement leadership that does care about and pay attention to the numbers. Absent IPOs, a lot of startups are nothing more than glorified boys' clubs, partying on the dime of oblivious investors. It's lousy that the culture of so many companies in startupland hate the bean counters. The little numbers can usually tell a lot.
- mdorazio 10y ago
  I don't quite understand your point in the context of twitter. It went public in 2013 and has been under investor scrutiny for the last 3 years. Even so, the sustainability problems have persisted despite the glaringly obvious balance sheets and steadily declining share price. This is a problem of investors (public and private) letting the board get away with hemorrhaging money for too long.
AndrewHampton 10y ago
Jack Dorsey became CEO of Twitter in October 2015. The numbers in the article are for all of 2015. Should he have been able to fix the financials in the first three months back as CEO? I feel like I'm missing something.
- elmin 10y ago
  The general consensus is people need to be laid off to cut costs. He hasn't done that.
  - coev 10y ago
    He did exactly that last year https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/twitter-is-laying-off-8-percent-of-the-company/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/twitter-is-laying-off-8-pe...
    - orsenthil 10y ago
      And then hired more number than that. Otherwise, the 4K number in twitter employee population would never come.
- notfromhere 10y ago
  Having one person be the CEO of two different companies at the same time just feels like an incredibly stupid idea.
  - eldavido 10y ago
    Arrogant but necessary. That it's tolerated by investors should give you a sense of how urgent/dire things are.
tboyd47 10y ago
Question: what happened in 2013 that made Twitter's operating costs increase 8x?
- gjolund 10y ago
  IPO
jondubois 10y ago
According to Google, Twitter has 4000 employees. The total cost of R&D and sales is $1.6B per year. Do the math: 1.6B/4000 = 400K per employee! ^ And that's assuming that all 4000 employees are working on R&D or sales. That number tells me that there is something REALLY wrong with the company. What kinds of people get paid $400K per year?
- daok 10y ago
  The cost of R&D covers more than just salary
- drakonandor 10y ago
  Does that include employee costs that the company covers, such as health insurance, retirement accounts, etc etc?
eldavido 10y ago
I couldn't agree more and I'm glad someone is talking about this. I also read SEC reports (Ks and Qs) and I'm appalled at what I'm seeing. I actually think it's bigger, though. Look at the original ethos of Silicon Valley: two mid-career guys in a garage working off-hours to get something going. There was a culture of cost-consciousness, a scrappy resourcefulness, built into these companies from day 1. Hell, they could've set up shop in San Francisco, but they opted for the suburbs instead, because they wanted to make it work. Quoting Paul Graham, in 2005: "For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive." [2] Fast forward 10-20 years. Have you been to the Twitter office? It's next to NEMA [1], an apartment complex where a cool $4000/month will get you 1-2 bedrooms. A juice from "The Market" underneath their office will run you $8, to go with your $15 sandwich. Everyone there seems to be OK wearing $100 shirts and expensive shoes. The office itself is impeccably painted and they have art all over the walls. I don't care about the money per se; the issue is focus. If all the energy dedicated to all this flashiness was dedicated into getting actual business results, Twitter might be in a different place today. Now, the standard argument against this is, we need to be in SF, and spend all this money, in the name of attracting the best talent. Perhaps, but, you have to wonder, when companies are climbing all over each other to get developers at $150-180K base plus cash bonuses, stock, etc., the case for being in SF gets more difficult. What I'm really saying is two things: (1) Tech has changed...a lot. Gone are the founding myths of Amazon's door-desks and Bill Gates, whose famous restaurant was a burger place. Now we all eat at two-star Michelin restaurants at $150/plate. (2) I wonder what this says about SF long-term. Sure, the good people are here, and sure, maybe it'll just be a slight correction. But I really think the case for locating a company elsewhere grows stronger each day given how expensive and difficult it is to run a company from here. [1] http://www.rentnema.com/floorplans.php http://www.rentnema.com/floorplans.php [2] http://paulgraham.com/start.html http://paulgraham.com/start.html
- Balgair 10y ago
  On your points about grad-student vs. law-firm: Yeah, all the 'real' hackers are out now. Just look at Google Maps, that thing was better 10 years ago than it is today. Complain all you want about the proliferation in devices, but the fact remains that it was better a decade ago. I say that to mean that the actual hackers and the neck-beards that care about the product are gone and have been replaced by bullshit artists. Reasonable people, people that have mortgages and get other people to change their oil. Let me repeat that: Google is full of BSAs now. Just look at the Burn, it's all cigarettes and blow now, not pot and LSD. It's a networking event! How in the heck did nepotism, sorry, I mean networking, get out to Gerlach? Where have the real hackers gone off to? Somewhere cheap, aka not the Bay Area. Look at Knoxville or Tallahassee, other Southern cities, Albuquerque and Reno, or Albany. Places with some sort of grad school (not just comp-sci, look at all that CRISPR-CAS9 stuff, oh man!) that does not have crazy rents nearby. A place where you can't tell if they are a grad student or a homeless dude. The 'real' hackers are out there being busy building things, thankyouverymuch, and not giving a damn about juices that someone else makes for them. It's not that Tech has changed, those toothy basement dwellers are a part of the human genetic code, it's that SF has changed. It's mature now, there are firms and suits and spouses that need to be kept. SF will continue along this path, it is not what it once was and really, all things evolve.

129 points by nikcub 10y ago

For anyone as confused as I was as to why the conclusion is 'inescapable', he seems to actually explain things in the previous blog post[1] and this one appears to just be an additional tidbit on top of that. [1]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-buyout-rumours.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...

max_ 10y ago
It's the unofficial of "Jack Dorsey is fired!"
martin_bech 10y ago
That article is spot on. It highlights the problems of the experience, and how insane the burn rate is, for something thats no doing anything new for users.

gjolund 10y ago

Been watching this train wreck in slow motion for years. This has been a long time coming and I am positioned to profit from it.

max_ 10y ago
Are you shorting or going long? Cause stuff is unpredictable!
- gjolund 10y ago
  Shorting.
  - happyslobro 10y ago
    Plot twist: he's actually hoping everyone else shorts, so that he can buy and go long ;)
    - gjolund 10y ago
      And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids!
  - roymurdock 10y ago
    If you read the author's (good) previous post on Twitter, you'll notice this at the end: "Twitter revenue is still rising and is running about $2.5 billion per annum. It is a website that once ran extremely well on less than $250 million in costs. (No I am not joking.) If you can't make this have a 40 percent operating margin then - frankly you are inadequately brutal. Personally I think 50 percent is possible. At this market cap that works extremely well for a financial buyer. Its a no-brainer even. So expect it to be bought. By some Wall Street bastard armed with a lot of debt. And that bastard will fire a lot of people. If I worked at Twitter I would be preparing my resume and providing a list of really quick things that can be done to improve the user experience - with the code all mapped out. That largely involves getting rid of spam bots and the like. But unless it radically improves the user experience or monetisation and you can convince the new owners you can implement then you are out. And the fashion-obsessed philosopher king. He is out too whether there is a buyer or not. That is necessary to save the company. John PS. Long for the takeout which I see as inevitable."

twblalock 10y ago

I suspect the lack of management focus is causing all of the waste. All of this investment in video, the various API services Twitter created and then discontinued, working on various Scala frameworks, probably a lot of internal data analysis tools, tweaks to the timeline format that nobody seemed to want... I just don't think a lot of what Twitter is doing is necessary to running a core business. The problem is that they don't have a core business -- they have several factions pushing competing visions of a core business and none of them can gain the upper hand. They need to decide what their core business is and focus on it. If you look at their list of active users, it's really something a lot of companies would kill for: almost every major politician, journalist, and celebrity in the US, and a similar presence in several other countries. It's just amazing that they can't figure out how to make a profit serving that kind of user base. I should add that aside from the exceptional success of Steve Jobs at Apple, bringing a founder back to run the company is not a very good sign.

maxerickson 10y ago
It wouldn't be surprising if the timeline stuff comes down to measured engagement going up while a modest number of vocal users make noise about change being bad.
calinet6 10y ago
I think that their focus has been on the experience for advertisers, which are less visible or feel negative to the end user (such as tweaks to the timeline—100% for advertisers and brands). However, those choices are probably highly influential to their revenue, and arguably they need to be working more on those things—which means even fewer visible changes that benefit end users. Either they're working on the wrong thing, or they're not working hard enough on the right thing. I don't see too much of a split focus—they know the base they have and they need to extract value while keeping the essence of the experience they have.
eldavido 10y ago
Interesting how this is an example of "societies crumble when their elites want to go in different directions". I agree that lack of focus is a big problem and wonder what those competing 2-3 visions are. I think Jack came back because he/the investors thought he was the only person with the political clout, or moral authority, to whip people into line behind him, and get the company moving in one direction

emdowling 10y ago

This (and the original post[0]) sum up how I feel about Twitter. Every few months (since joining in 2009), I jump on and attempt to curate my feed to only get stuff I care about. I stick around for a few weeks, then get overwhelmed by the deluge. So I constantly curate and trim and it all becomes very tiresome. I want Twitter to be a feed of news and opinions from organisations and people I care about, but it is far too hard to jump in and see how a conversation started or evolved. It is far too hard to filter out the noise. Honestly, my RSS feeds give me everything I need and they've been going strong for over 10 years. Sprinkle in a bit of Apple News to fill in the blanks and Twitter quickly finds itself in the "too hard" basket. The financial state of Twitter highlighted by this article is mind-blowing. How on earth have costs crept up so much with no meaningful improvement in product? As a very astute tech-savvy person, I cannot see anything that Twitter has done in years that have made it better. That stands in stark contrast to Facebook. I'm sad about this because Twitter has been such an integral part of the modern internet, in democratising information. It's role in the Arab Spring alone was world-changing. It's a pity it hasn't been able to harness this. [0]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-buyout-rumours.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...

digi_owl 10y ago
The Arab Spring thing is hyperbole to the hilt. If anything, Facebook and Twitter acted as pacifiers. While people could use them, they stayed inside rather than get involved in the streets. Only when the authorities cut the connection did shit hit the fan, as the masses ventured outside to keep up what was happening. Thinking about it, i suspect Twitter was an artifact of the US mobile market. It provided a way to do mass texts at a low cost. But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to exist kinda evaporated. On top of that they had basically handed the task of innovating over to third parties via their APIs. I still recall seeing people use Tweetdeck on desktop Windows with multiple columns set up on different topics, hashtags, and people during large events. This to allow them to track the full breath of what was happening at a glance. Crazy thing is that Twitter did integrate the "column" concept into their service, via lists. But neither their site nor their apps allow us to access those lists in any way similar to Tweetdeck. In contrast, most third party clients will support a column view these days.

sushid 10y ago

Why does he believe that only one in three employees will be keeping a job post-acquisition? Not that the engineers will have to worry. They have a very talented engineering team that will be sought out by every headhunter if that's the case but it all seems baseless.

ryhamz 10y ago
Twitter is going to switch into maintenance rather than growth mode. You don't need as many engineers to do that. If they cut their operating costs down, they might actually make money. Those that leave, by choice or not, will go on to build up other places that don't yet have their product.
- overcast 10y ago
  From my perspective, Twitter has been in maintenance mode for years. What significant changes have been made that requires thousands of engineers? I'm being serious here. The interface is still the same clunky mess, the home page has been rearranged a few times, and now we have even more convoluted rules as to what counts towards your 140 character limit.
  - elmin 10y ago
    Yet they've managed to massively raise their r&d expenses.
intoverflow2 10y ago
>They have a very talented engineering team Do they? What have they been doing all these years? As a user the product just seems to get worse and worse for me and despite the massive dev team they actually outsourced the mac client...
- calinet6 10y ago
  They haven't been building things for you. They've been building things for advertisers.

Tomrn 10y ago

favourite line from the article - "the plural of anecdote is data" nice.

leephillips 10y ago
Yes, very clever - but also, by now, a venerable quip.
afandian 10y ago
I was going to reply "you realise that 'the plural of anecdote is not data' is the usual phrasing" so I spent a few seconds searching. According to this blog, the original doesn't include the 'not': http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-not-data.html http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-an... Funny how subverted phrases can supplant the original.

justinlardinois 10y ago

Anyone else get tripped up when the underlined "He simply does not deserve the job" turned out to not be a link?

staticelf 10y ago
Yes, I didn't understand the article so this was the only thing I thought about.

alex_hitchins 10y ago

Have they ever tried to charge to follow certain accounts? Say someone popular has 1m followers, all new followers would need to pay a subscription fee to receive all their tweets. It's a bit like the old CelebIndex. The more followers someone has they more the tweets cost. I'm thinking something like 1 or 2 pence per tweet. This is probably a terrible idea.

rco8786 10y ago
This would have bankrupted Ken Bone's grandmother overnight.
coev 10y ago
A celeb/politician/etc's popularity is what brings regular people to twitter. To charge the celeb would be counterproductive and probably move them over to a competitor for good.
- alex_hitchins 10y ago
  Sorry - I meant that it would cost general users say 50P a month to receive tweets from say a major A-lister, but 25p to recieve the tweets of a C-lister. People could get them for free, just delayed by say 30 minutes.

0xmohit 10y ago

Not being a Twitter user myself, it's hard to comment on how it is. However, a number of their open source projects [0] are really really good. [0] https://github.com/twitter/ https://github.com/twitter/

nailer 10y ago

> When Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue it had $1.008 billion of income before taxes. > Twitter is kind of different. > When Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses before tax. For a UK based site, the English here is incredibly poor. The first sentence implies a comparison to when Twitter had a similar level of revenue. Making sense of it: > Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue and $1.008 billion of income before taxes. > Twitter is kind of different. > Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses before tax.

davidivadavid 10y ago
If you want to keep the parallel structure you would want to compare Twitter's revenue and their income (loss) before tax, just like he did for Facebook. That tripped me up too.

throw2016 10y ago

The 'arab spring' is nothing but the US and other vested interests stirring up trouble in these countries. Revolution does not happen by itself. It takes money, effort and organization to get otherwise passive citizens to raise their head above the parapet and more often than not it's to futher the organizers interests. Libya before and Libya now is a perfect example of a complete disaster for the people and another crime against humanity. Saudi Arabia, the most repressive regime in the region and chief promoter of terrorist ideology and the one place that requires a 'spring' is the western world's best friend in the region and remains 'strangely' but predictably untouched by the 'arab spring'. This is just unadulterated propaganda. We have far too many of these 'springs' repeated over and over again in the last 100 years to know what's happening and the modus-operandi and yet every story on facebook and twitter naively persist in rehashing this propaganda. These interventions under the cover of 'human rights' are always to further some agenda and given the massive upheaval and suffering they cause to populations its difficult to see how any believer in humanity can't continue to support these blatantly self serving actions.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> Revolution does not happen by itself I actually think revolution needs to happen by itself. The overlap between the skills needed to organise armed insurrection and to govern are similar. Issues come up when still-formentig revolutions are prematurely encouraged. They may succeed in toppling the prior regime, but they never forged a shared identity and set of norms fit for rallying, organising and deploying force and order - the bread and butter of nascent governance.
pessimizer 10y ago
The US generally didn't even support the Arab Spring, and actively worked against it in Egypt, a country with nearly as tight a relationship with the US as Saudi Arabia, that receives nearly as much military aid from the US as Israel. Everything is so much more complicated than you're making it out to be here.

raverbashing 10y ago

800Mi in R&D for Twitter? Almost the same figure for sales & marketing? Really, what are they doing? This makes no sense OK, Apple is @ 10Bi per year approximately http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-spending-jumps-to-25b-in-q2-accounted-for-5-of-total-revenue http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-spending-... (but developing hardware and silicon is not cheap

mathattack 10y ago
R&D is a fuzzy bucket. A lot of ongoing maintenance can wind up there. (Improves the optics on unit economics)
jpalomaki 10y ago
Also good to take a look at how the Apple R&D figure has developed: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273006/apple-expenses-for-research-and-development/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273006/apple-expenses-fo... Take for example 2010. R&D was less than $2Bi, but they already had iPhone 4, iPods, maintained two operating systems and bunch of other software, had the desktop line, two laptops lines and launched iPad.
jondubois 10y ago
Yes it's crazy; if you add up R&D + Sales, the total is $1.6B; their revenue is only $2.2B... And that's without factoring in the costs of simply keeping the business running - They still need to pay datacenter costs and salaries related to the ongoing maintenance of the site. When you look at the billions of R&D dollars which were spent over the past few years, you have to wonder where all the money went. I can't remember the last time Twitter released an innovative product... If ever. It's not like they were spending their R&D on high-risk ventures like finding a cure for cancer or building a quantum computer. With the kind of R&D they do, you expect to see results at reasonable intervals... I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of fraud going on.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago

Twitters manipulation of this election cycle will cost them large swathes of users in the long run. You cant set yourself up as a communication utility and then get so involved in politics, it is bad for business.

ihsw 10y ago
That would be the result of the Trust and Safety Council. https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-safety-council https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s... https://about.twitter.com/safety/council https://about.twitter.com/safety/council The roster of members is notably liberal-leaning and partisan across the board. But you are correct, it's clear they make no effort to maintain an impartial and fair platform.

shawnee_ 10y ago

Twitter is the classic example of waiting too long to IPO. I understand there's a sort of cultish wisdom to delay an IPO for as long as (legally) possible; however, the underlying sustainability of a business either "just works" or it doesn't. The problems that plague Twitter today could and probably should have been caught at least a couple years before it IPO'ed at the very end of 2013. IPO'ing in the public exchange basically teases out sustainability problems. And regardless of what you think of American capitalism, the public markets are the best available detectives we have to investigate sustainability problems. When sustainability is iffy, owners of the company get their vote, and then they get to implement leadership that does care about and pay attention to the numbers. Absent IPOs, a lot of startups are nothing more than glorified boys' clubs, partying on the dime of oblivious investors. It's lousy that the culture of so many companies in startupland hate the bean counters. The little numbers can usually tell a lot.

mdorazio 10y ago
I don't quite understand your point in the context of twitter. It went public in 2013 and has been under investor scrutiny for the last 3 years. Even so, the sustainability problems have persisted despite the glaringly obvious balance sheets and steadily declining share price. This is a problem of investors (public and private) letting the board get away with hemorrhaging money for too long.

AndrewHampton 10y ago

Jack Dorsey became CEO of Twitter in October 2015. The numbers in the article are for all of 2015. Should he have been able to fix the financials in the first three months back as CEO? I feel like I'm missing something.

elmin 10y ago
The general consensus is people need to be laid off to cut costs. He hasn't done that.
- coev 10y ago
  He did exactly that last year https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/twitter-is-laying-off-8-percent-of-the-company/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/twitter-is-laying-off-8-pe...
  - orsenthil 10y ago
    And then hired more number than that. Otherwise, the 4K number in twitter employee population would never come.
notfromhere 10y ago
Having one person be the CEO of two different companies at the same time just feels like an incredibly stupid idea.
- eldavido 10y ago
  Arrogant but necessary. That it's tolerated by investors should give you a sense of how urgent/dire things are.

tboyd47 10y ago

Question: what happened in 2013 that made Twitter's operating costs increase 8x?

gjolund 10y ago
IPO

jondubois 10y ago

According to Google, Twitter has 4000 employees. The total cost of R&D and sales is $1.6B per year. Do the math: 1.6B/4000 = 400K per employee! ^ And that's assuming that all 4000 employees are working on R&D or sales. That number tells me that there is something REALLY wrong with the company. What kinds of people get paid $400K per year?

daok 10y ago
The cost of R&D covers more than just salary
drakonandor 10y ago
Does that include employee costs that the company covers, such as health insurance, retirement accounts, etc etc?

eldavido 10y ago

I couldn't agree more and I'm glad someone is talking about this. I also read SEC reports (Ks and Qs) and I'm appalled at what I'm seeing. I actually think it's bigger, though. Look at the original ethos of Silicon Valley: two mid-career guys in a garage working off-hours to get something going. There was a culture of cost-consciousness, a scrappy resourcefulness, built into these companies from day 1. Hell, they could've set up shop in San Francisco, but they opted for the suburbs instead, because they wanted to make it work. Quoting Paul Graham, in 2005: "For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive." [2] Fast forward 10-20 years. Have you been to the Twitter office? It's next to NEMA [1], an apartment complex where a cool $4000/month will get you 1-2 bedrooms. A juice from "The Market" underneath their office will run you $8, to go with your $15 sandwich. Everyone there seems to be OK wearing $100 shirts and expensive shoes. The office itself is impeccably painted and they have art all over the walls. I don't care about the money per se; the issue is focus. If all the energy dedicated to all this flashiness was dedicated into getting actual business results, Twitter might be in a different place today. Now, the standard argument against this is, we need to be in SF, and spend all this money, in the name of attracting the best talent. Perhaps, but, you have to wonder, when companies are climbing all over each other to get developers at $150-180K base plus cash bonuses, stock, etc., the case for being in SF gets more difficult. What I'm really saying is two things: (1) Tech has changed...a lot. Gone are the founding myths of Amazon's door-desks and Bill Gates, whose famous restaurant was a burger place. Now we all eat at two-star Michelin restaurants at $150/plate. (2) I wonder what this says about SF long-term. Sure, the good people are here, and sure, maybe it'll just be a slight correction. But I really think the case for locating a company elsewhere grows stronger each day given how expensive and difficult it is to run a company from here. [1] http://www.rentnema.com/floorplans.php http://www.rentnema.com/floorplans.php [2] http://paulgraham.com/start.html http://paulgraham.com/start.html

Balgair 10y ago
On your points about grad-student vs. law-firm: Yeah, all the 'real' hackers are out now. Just look at Google Maps, that thing was better 10 years ago than it is today. Complain all you want about the proliferation in devices, but the fact remains that it was better a decade ago. I say that to mean that the actual hackers and the neck-beards that care about the product are gone and have been replaced by bullshit artists. Reasonable people, people that have mortgages and get other people to change their oil. Let me repeat that: Google is full of BSAs now. Just look at the Burn, it's all cigarettes and blow now, not pot and LSD. It's a networking event! How in the heck did nepotism, sorry, I mean networking, get out to Gerlach? Where have the real hackers gone off to? Somewhere cheap, aka not the Bay Area. Look at Knoxville or Tallahassee, other Southern cities, Albuquerque and Reno, or Albany. Places with some sort of grad school (not just comp-sci, look at all that CRISPR-CAS9 stuff, oh man!) that does not have crazy rents nearby. A place where you can't tell if they are a grad student or a homeless dude. The 'real' hackers are out there being busy building things, thankyouverymuch, and not giving a damn about juices that someone else makes for them. It's not that Tech has changed, those toothy basement dwellers are a part of the human genetic code, it's that SF has changed. It's mature now, there are firms and suits and spouses that need to be kept. SF will continue along this path, it is not what it once was and really, all things evolve.