18 ms·

Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

458 points by bentlegen 10y ago

dbg31415 10y ago
How many people does it really take to run Twitter? If they need more than 100 people I'd be really shocked.
- adrenalinelol 10y ago
  I'd wager a bit more than that to maintain existing services. But they haven't given up on growth yet, disappointing news doesn't = throw in the towel. If these rumors are true, best of luck to those affected.
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    But 3,750? Does anyone think Twitter needs that many people? Scale back to the bare essentials and regroup. Clearly the people there haven't been good for ambitious growth, time to shake it up, find a buyer (which will be easier with less overhead), or close the doors.
    - dingbat 10y ago
      they should focus on being THE platform for key influencers, "thought leaders" and celebrities, mover-and-shaker types, kind of like Yahoo did with Katie Couric!
  - notfromhere 10y ago
    Even to grow, does twitter really need 3,800 employees? The site hasn't exactly seen much change in the past few years.
    - forgettableuser 10y ago
      Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago, complaining about the poor quality in modern software. He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter, and mocks a UI problem he just had. Twitter starts at 7 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA
      - dbg31415 10y ago
        http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png Thanks. Good video.
        flukus 10y ago
        How do you even grow like that? The current staff during that spike must have spent most of their time interviewing people.
        cpeterso 10y ago
        That spike is misleading because the chart jumps from "Jan '11" to "Dec '13", 23 months. The other columns are all 12 months apart.
        sjnsjn 10y ago
        still, 100+ joining every month, that surely was not an easy task by any means.
- smashed 10y ago
  And how many people do you need to monetize Twitter?
  - revelation 10y ago
    Well, either a lot more or a lot less.
- hogrammer 10y ago
  They apparently need an army of Social Justice Warriors with gender studies degrees to sit and ban people for "fat shaming" and supporting Trump!
- throwaway420 10y ago
  It's hard for me to understand how Twitter has so many employees when: a) The site has relatively few major features beyond displaying lots of text in chronological order. b) The site is so overwhelmingly shitty. They had a great thing going for themselves years back when developers were really excited about building on the Twitter API and experimenting with it in all kinds of ways and creating great new apps daily. That stopped when Twitter started running wild and harassing devs and making investment into the Twitter ecosystem practically impossible. They could have kept their costs down and just needed a small number of employees to keep the infrastructure up.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  > How many people does it really take to run Twitter? Given that the Salesforce buyout fell over because Salesforce didn't want to be associated with the alt-rightists and other assorted neo-Nazis running around the service, apparently more people in their abuse team than they currently have.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Their abuse team is going to be their downfall.
  - meowface 10y ago
    Do you have a source on that rationale for Salesforce backing out?
    - nl 10y ago
      It's been pretty widely reported. This is a good summary: Twitter's reputation as a haven for trolls was one of the key reasons both Disney and Salesforce declined to make bids for Twitter, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC host Jim Cramer.... the family-friendly animation giant had even hired two investment banks to work out a bid for the service, but eventually decided not to put a deal on the table, fearing that Twitter's sexist, racist, and otherwise unpleasant abusers would sully Disney's image..... Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had expressed concerns about Twitter's problems with user abuse directly to him. "What's happened is, a lot of the bidders are looking at people with lots of followers and seeing the hatred," Cramer said, claiming that Salesforce was "very concerned about this notion." http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13328380/twitter-abuse-disney-salesforce-bids-pulled http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13328380/twitter-abuse-di...
      - deleted 10y ago
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- retrogradeorbit 10y ago
  Whats app comes to mind as a comparison. Far more complex. A billion customers. 35 engineers.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Nah, WA started as a 1:1 direct messaging service with next to no server storage - so all the backend had to do was to distribute the incoming messages to the recipient ASAP in order to keep storage load low. Twitter's backend is far more complex, you have a 1:n distribution (with n occasionally drifting into the double-digit million counts, like President Obama), and all the messages have to be archived and live searchable.
    - ryhamz 10y ago
      Agreed. The keys to making whatsapp work were tuning an XMPP server for and the Erlang VM for performance, which takes a few very smart people, but not a large quantity.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      And targeted ad sales, the complexity of which should not be underestimated.
artursapek 10y ago
I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to come crashing down eventually if you don't stop somewhere. Either you do it gracefully or hundreds of folks have to eventually lose their job unexpectedly (very sad). Is the answer simply that earlier VCs put pressure on the executives to keep growing so they can multiply their investment? Personally I dream of making a living establishing a patio11-type software business. Something where I can do a high quality job and own all of the decision-making. The ceiling doesn't have to be very high for one guy to sustain himself, and software is appealing because you can automate away nearly all of the "work".
- rogerthis 10y ago
  One reason is the rise of other players.
  - harryh 10y ago
    This is perhaps the current best response to the question. The idea that twitter can exists as it currently does indefinitely is probably false. It will either grow or die when a competitor better exploits the ecological niche.
- nameisu 10y ago
  facebook wants new users so it came up with free basics shit.
- Naritai 10y ago
  Would you buy a stock that is guaranteed to stay flat for the discernible future? No? Then you have your answer. (let's not forget that, thanks to inflation, 'flat' is actually losing money over time.)
  - 10y ago
pmiller2 10y ago
I know this is premature, but I can't help but wonder what the effect of Twitter going under would have on the Bay Area tech scene.
- idlewords 10y ago
  http://www.theonion.com/article/48-hour-internet-outage-plunges-nation-into-produc-779 http://www.theonion.com/article/48-hour-internet-outage-plun...
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  Twitter employs around 3900 people total, 2300 in San Francisco (numbers are from some random google sources, so may be off by a bit/time). In the first quarter, Yahoo laid off 3,135 people in the Bay Area. Twitter going under would be newsworthy, but I don't think make too much of a splash in the job market -- at least not any more than the normal tides.
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    Maybe the loss of Twitter as a platform for social media self-promotion would be more significant than the direct effects of 2300 people suddenly on the job market?
    - niftich 10y ago
      Conversely, other platforms have already come along that target some of Twitter's use-cases and offered better UX and user engagement. I'm sure they, or a new player, could fill the void (successfully). This is also less of a problem today (as opposed to years ago) when everyone with a meaningful social presence cross-posts or maintains a split presence on multiple platforms.
      - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
        Is this true? At least within the niche of security and crypto academia, I find Twitter to be a very useful tool.
madengr 10y ago
You'd think they would have figured out targeted ads by now. If I follow people who post about RF/Microwave, antennas, SDR, and ham radio, one would think I'd see ads from Keysight and Tektronix, but no, it's garbage like football and pop music. FAIL! I also don't like that I don't see all the tweets from a person. They are pruning the timeline. Good riddance to twitter.
- nameisu 10y ago
  Is there a third party app which would not show promoted tweets? they are so annoying and un related
  - groby_b 10y ago
    IIRC, that'd get the apps API access cut off. But if you want to have fun, keep blocking promoted tweets. After a month or two, things get... "interesting" in terms of what you see. Well, at least entertaining.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - deleted 10y ago
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    - tanocuto 10y ago
      3rd party clients have literally no way to pull promoted tweets, i.e. you'll never see any in a 3rd party client.
    - x5315 10y ago
      Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12789001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12789001 Only one third party app receives Promoted Tweets, and no third party apps are required to display them.
  - Overtonwindow 10y ago
    What about repetitive tweets? I stopped following so many publications because they would post an article link, then repeatedly change the title or the catch and post the same link. Very frustrating.
niftich 10y ago
Can we talk about Fabric again? Fabric [1] is a product done by Twitter but heavily de-emphasizes the Twitter association -- it's a value-added Twitter SDK that apps can build into themselves and get crash reporting (ex-Crashlytics) and ad network integration (MoPub) too. In the scheme of Twitter's self-reflection trying to figure out how to cut costs and find what it wants to do, do you feel Fabric fits into it? Do you feel the 'core platform' i.e. the microblogging site fits into it? Should the less strategic one of these be spun out; or should they be less separated? [1] https://get.fabric.io https://get.fabric.io
- tootie 10y ago
  Fabric is a good product, but all Apple has to do is wave their hands and it's dead. If/when they launch their own product, third-parties fun will be over.
  - ng12 10y ago
    Fabric's been supporting Android since very early on. I'm sure they don't want to compete with Apple but it certainly wouldn't kill the platform either.
- traskjd 10y ago
  Fabric fits in by providing twitter with a boat load of demographic and app usage data. They may still want that data for advertising purposes. Having said that, I'm personally always wary about using an infrastructure piece for free. If my app relies on something, it's pretty important that it not easily go away. I can't count the HN threads of upset developers, frustrated about something being shuttered that was provided free. Disclosure: I'm the co-founder of https://raygun.com https://raygun.com which does mobile crash reporting, and more.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  This is why I don't use Fabric. It's really unfortunate. This great piece of technology doesn't belong to them. I would use it if it was owned by some other company that's more fit for the ownership, such as Google, because I know they have a clear business model and know exactly what they will do with the data they gather. But at this point Twitter has 0 trust among developers. Why would I depend on a piece of technology developed by a company that's struggling to find a way to make money and will probably do whatever is possible to extract value out of its assets? (Which includes spinning it off to oblivion)
throw2016 10y ago
There is value in twitter. Even the people who joke about twitter probably realise there is value in it. There is still nothing that enables one to broadcast information and enable real time conversations better than twitter for companies, governments orgs or celebrities. That twitter cannot extract value from these cash rich and price insensitive entities is a gigantic mystery.
- niftich 10y ago
  It's risky -- it's hard to compete with 'free', because it takes no money and very little effort. If Twitter charges even just a little for influencers to post, lots of them will just shift more of their announcements to Facebook status updates -- a somewhat similar feature of the other social app everyone already has installed. Despite no one platform offering exact feature+UX parity with Twitter, there are several other free platforms that are good enough for people. If Twitter makes changes that make posting on it harder, its still-organically-growing competitors could see an influx of people who will choose to abandon Twitter.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    I'm used to seeing junk on Fb and constantly ignore it; I don't think Twitter suffers from that.
    - fwn 10y ago
      In both cases, Twitter and Facebook, the content you see is entirely based on who you follow.
- LordHumungous 10y ago
  Right? I really don't get it. There are entire industries built around producing content that goes viral. Charge Coca Cola $eleventy million for "super tweets" that look like normal tweets. Maybe this is already happening?
- dingbat 10y ago
  in order to extract value, isnt it first necessary to define that value (of broadcasting info and enabling real time conversations)? that would seem to be a big mystery.
deleted 10y ago
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Overtonwindow 10y ago
Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is how does Twitter make money? I mean real money. Not valuation of eyeballs, not VC cash, but honest to God profit? It has always baffled me and I wish I knew what the unicorns say to the VC's when (hopefully) someone asks this question.
- niftich 10y ago
  Selling display ads (ie. the same way Facebook and Google have done and succeeded)
  - shard972 10y ago
    Didn't twitter say years ago they had a business model plan that didn't revolve around advertising?
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  Ads. Pretty incredible right?
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Someone else mentioned targeted display ads already, but Twitter also licenses their full data set to Google (and others) previously for millions. 1 - http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/05/googles-slippery-slope-if-search-giant-pays-twitter-for-content-should-it-pay-all-publishers/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/05/googles-slippery-slope-if-...
- eldavido 10y ago
  Read their SEC filings: https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-13646&CIK=1418091 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645... If you've never read one of these, you might be surprised how much is disclosed, and in great detail to boot.
- saretired 10y ago
  They have revenue from advertising and from selling access to their data; what they don't have is profits. Twitter raised about $1.8 billion in convertible notes in 2014. The proceeds have helped them plug the revenue shortfall, however, the bonds mature in 2019 and 2021, and since the share conversion price is around $77, the bondholders will be looking for cash instead unless Twitter's stock price increases 4-fold from its current price. The overhang of these bonds is something I have not seen mentioned in comments about Twitter here; it has likely been a large factor for potential purchasers and it will be an increasing worry for the company and its shareholders unless the company manages to become solidly profitable.
rch 10y ago
My sense is that while Twitter has been able to hire some very talented engineers (incl. but not limited to those I know personally), the high-level technical leadership hasn't been particularly successful. Is there room for an independent 'moonshot' team reporting directly to the board?
booleanbetrayal 10y ago
I have a market need of being able to broadcast messages megaphone-style to the internet, but they have to be artificially constrained to ..
mrcsparker 10y ago
I wonder why Twitter doesn't do consulting. They have developed a lot of the big data frameworks that we use today and understand how to scale. They have the talent and are in a unique position of being Twitter.
- Rapzid 10y ago
  Just out of curiosity, which ones have they developed?
  - niftich 10y ago
    Some software that Twitter has put out: [1] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron https://github.com/twitter/heron [2] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [3] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [4] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard https://github.com/twitter/gizzard [5] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache https://github.com/twitter/twemcache [6] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy
    - moderation 10y ago
      [7] Mesos, abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively. - http://mesos.apache.org/ http://mesos.apache.org/ Mesos was invented at UC Berkeley but developed and battle tested at Twitter.
    - brooklyndude 10y ago
      Bootstrap too.
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
butner 10y ago
Why the 4a PDT earning call? Ahead of opening of (TYO) Tokyo stock exchange Friday am which trades Softbank?
- JamesMcMinn 10y ago
  Their explanation, I believe, was that their planned time would have overlapped with several other calls, so analysis requested that they moved it. https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=995072 https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=...
josep2 10y ago
Twitter is by far the #1 service I use everyday. It's been the most valuable to me from a networking perspective where I've made friends and professional connections. I also happen to be a shareholder. It's been disappointing to watch Twitter try to become a business and completely falling flat. The acquisition of Vine and Periscope haven't led to much and the user growth from Live video is still t be seen. The product is immensely complicated compared to something like Instagram or Snapchat. It manages to be everything and nothing at the same time. I've been a fan of Jack Dorsey's work at Square but monetization is a complete different animal in that industry. To summarize I just don't know what the future of Twitter as a business will hold but I guess I'm here for the ride.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Twitter needs to find a frictionless way to get paid by their regular users that most users won't notice or think much about. Several potentials exist: can charge to follow additional users above a certain threshold; can charge to expand publishing platform (i.e., to be followed by more than a certain quantity of users); can have "premium channel"-style users that only paid members can follow (this may also be a way to allow publishers to monetize; set your feed "paid follower only" and split the revenue with Twitter), and so forth. The FREE! model only works out when you can sell your users' attention. Twitter has proven that it can't do that -- for whatever reason, user attention on Twitter is not worth what it's worth on Facebook or Google and they can't make a profit from it. So they need another way to monetize, and IMO that should be the tried and true "make people pay for what they use".
  - bad_user 10y ago
    Paying in order to increase the maximum count of followers sounds really bad, given that those are the users that also generate content and hence the reason for why you also have lurkers with under 100 followers that just consume content. Your proposal is a terrible idea, because Twitter should be paying those that genuinely attract an audience, not vice versa, since those people can always switch. Popular people will be popular anywhere. E.g. Linus Tolvards has a big and active audience on Google+, even though it is in general a ghost town.
Raed667 10y ago
Twitter should be bought by a non-profit and get re-opened to 3rd party tools like it used to be. I hate the current Twitter, but can't neglect the benefits it has for the entire world (and not only twitter users)
xenadu02 10y ago
I still maintain that screwing over client developers had something to do with it. At the very least it didn't help them "control the twitter experience". Every time I see one of their new ads about how much Twitter loves developers I laugh out loud. There is zero chance I'll ever integrate Twitter into anything I do, period. I'll fight against it anywhere I work and encourage all my peers to do the same. Did everyone forget they didn't even invent the word "Tweet"? Nor did they write their mobile clients. They had no idea what they were doing and stumbled into success. Then the MBAs turned around and stabbed us in the back. Twitter can fuck right off.
- nestlequ1k 10y ago
  I feel the same way. I stopped using Twitter after that betrayal and never bothered to come back to it. Don't know if it made the difference to hurting their business, but I feel they missed out on something big by losing developer mindshare.
  - kbart 10y ago
    What "betrayal" are you talking about? I've never used Twitter, so my knowledge lacks a little.
    - xyzzy4 10y ago
      IIRC, they changed their policies and APIs to being much more restrictive against 3rd party apps. Something to do with rate limits maybe.
    - teej 10y ago
      After years of being increasingly hostile to 3rd party developers, Twitter finally decided that you needed their permission to have more than 100k users of your twitter client. That announcement was bundled with tightened rate limiting and stricter controls over how you could display tweets. This was the final stake in the coffin for many Twitter clients. https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-of-the-twitter-api https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-o...
chinese_dan 10y ago
Twitter lost the trust of many users and are now suffering the consequences. It was once supposed to be the place for the freedom of speech and truth and is now just another arm of the left-leaning politicians in the US. So many conservative/libertarian political figures and personalities have been permanently banned from Twitter in the last year for only posting an opinion that it can no longer be chalked up to circumstance. Good riddance.
- gjolund 10y ago
  Thats what happens when some of your biggest investors live in Saudi Arabia.
- Retra 10y ago
  Why was it supposed to be a place for freedom and truth?
- efdee 10y ago
  I would be interested in seeing a list of political figures and personalities that got banned and the reason for their ban.
santaclaus 10y ago
app.net should have waited three years to pivot into a Twitter competitor...
nikcub 10y ago
No offense to the people I know working at Twitter, but these cuts aren't deep enough to stem the losses. While Twitter revenue grew $664M, $1,403M to $2,218M over the past three years, it is going to be a lot flatter than that at the end of this year - and despite that growth they've consistently been losing about $500M p.a ($645M, $577M and $521M respectively) 3,800 people work there - and equivalent cuts last year can barely be noticed on the financials. The good times are over - they've spent billions over the last few years and not done anything to save them from flat user growth. They really need a wholesale shakeup and doing it over time, like Yahoo did, will just make it worse. edit: here's a more brutal analysis [0][1]: > PS. Twitter staff - I am not exaggerating. Look at the young man on your left and the young woman on your right. Only one of you three will keep your job. [0] part 1 - http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-buyout-rumours.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/some-comment-on... [1] part 2 - http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/measuring-how-bad-twitter-is.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/measuring-how-b...
- rattray 10y ago
  Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per employee. What's all that money for?
  - nikcub 10y ago
    Stock options. It starts at the top: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large Being paid $72M p.a to oversee ~$500M p.a in losses. Great job if you can get it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - nikcub 10y ago
      more info from their filing[0]: > During the twelve months ended December 31, 2015 and 2014, we recognized $682.1 million and $631.6 million of expense related to stock-based compensation, respectively. As of December 31, 2015, we had unrecognized stock-based compensation expense of approximately $1.25 billion related to outstanding equity awards [0] see page 47 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-13646&CIK=1418091 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645...
bluthru 10y ago
Twitter should have a tweet quota and charge people who tweet too much. People who chase hashtags and reply with reaction gifs have turned it into low-brow garbage.
- kbart 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure tweet count is used as a growth metric somewhere, so it's not gonna happen.
  - felipeerias 10y ago
    Same story with bots and "active users".
  - bluthru 10y ago
    Too much tweeting caused them to summarize and ignore chronological order, so one would hope they realize that too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
ricksplat 10y ago
I'm just back from a holiday in south east Asia. All the time I was there I was getting ads on twitter targetted to the local market (in the local language) presumably based on my roaming IP. Maybe my grasp is a bit simplistic but isn't this just intensely stupid? My twitter profile is explicitly Western European is twitter's location based advertising really just as dumb as matching IP addresses to regions? If I were an advertiser I wouldn't be too happy about twitter claiming 'impressions' like this.
- glandium 10y ago
  This is not limited to Twitter. I live in Japan, most ads I see all around the web are in Japanese for Japanese stuff. I went to Germany a couple years ago, and everything was German when I was there. This is even more ridiculous for the unskippable 30s video ads on Youtube.
  - detaro 10y ago
    Meanwhile I'm German, live in Germany and for a while got english ads of the style "Welcome in Germany! As an expat, let us sell you some private health insurance!". What a mess.
- dvirsky 10y ago
  it's a very low percentage of users all in all, doesn't really matter especially if you're charging by clicks and not impressions.
system16 10y ago
Apart from killing their third-party ecosystem, I think Twitter's biggest failure has been their inability to monetize their huge celebrity and brand base, and I wonder if this partly has to do with their "verified account" system. How to charge celebrities/brands without pissing everyone off? Top-tier celebrities and brands can and would easily fork out high fees to use Twitter. But Twitter can't just charge some blanket fee to verified accounts because right now, "verified accounts" are not exclusive enough. They also include "key influencers", bloggers, industry people, other hangers-on (let's call them Group B) and they can't/won't support the high fees and would revolt. Twitter could try and create a new way to categorize celebs/brands, but that would confuse things and may make Group B users feel less elite: so they'd revolt as well.
kriro 10y ago
I feel like a takeover is only a matter of time. If you're Alphabet or Facebook you're probably interested (I'd say Alphabet should be more interested, for Facebook it's probably mostly a blocker play). The question is how long do you let them "rot" to drive down the acquisition price?
gjolund 10y ago
Called it.
- sctb 10y ago
  This account has posted too many unsubstantive comments after we've asked repeatedly to stop, so we've banned it.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
Says the frog to the scorpion: "Why have you stung me? We will both die." and the scorpion answers "I'm a VC and I will always aim for the 10x exit, this is my nature"
netik 10y ago
The sad thing is that the market will love this and the stock will go up, while many engineers wonder where their job went, and mid-managers/execs will reap a profit.
NietTim 10y ago
Ah, maybe people won't get shadow banned at the same rates anymore now. Just maybe it's a good thing
jamnik 10y ago
Obamas economic growth
krzrak 10y ago
Not cool for Twitter employees to learn about such thing from the press, not officially from their management.
jqueryin 10y ago
One of Twitter's problem is not properly controlling their feed. I never use their mobile or web client. I solely use a highly customized Tweetdeck. With this experience, I never once see an advertisement. That's a huge loss for Twitter. Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't have a problem seeing advertisements in my Tweetdeck feed if it meant they'd remain successful. I'd much rather see Twitter succeed as it's the only platform I use to keep up with thousands of professionals and news sources. It's entirely a different experience than Facebook. I think the Twitter community should suck it up and accept the fact that they get served a couple of advertisements in order to support a news service and contend delivery network unlike any other in existence.
- system16 10y ago
  What's bizarre is I thought the whole purpose of cutting off/restricting third-party clients was so that they could control what was in the feed i.e., serve advertisements. If they still allow some/limited third-party clients and don't force ads into those feeds, what was the point of burning their bridges with the developer community?
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    What Twitter did was install rate limits on free access to the API. This means that to provide a full-service 3rd party client, the app developer has to pay Twitter to get above the rate limits. So: if your 3rd party app is not showing ads (as most don't), Twitter is still getting some revenue from the app developer. Personally, to me this seems like a reasonable trade off. But a lot of 3rd party app developers could not afford to pay those fees, and so lost their businesses. You can see how that would piss them off. But from Twitter's perspective, they were just freeloaders.
bad_user 10y ago
Came here to say that I love Twitter and am online on it far more than on any other service. I even clicked on its served commercials, because Twitter has my professional network and managed to score some ads that triggered my interest, versus on Facebook where I have a list of friends and acquaintances with which I've got little in common with. Their problem is their ad inventory and their targeting. They should serve more ads and improve their targeting.
mrmondo 10y ago
I don't really have any insightful input into this other than to say, I hope they're cutting the people they most likely don't need. Twitter is the only social platform I actually like and still use, and the only thing that could replace it would be similar but decentralised and as widely adopted. Why / where are they failing - are they failing? I know more people on and using Twitter than ever, many of those have left other aging social networks after finding them irrelevant or too invasive of privacy. Twitter is simple, Twitter is what it is and it doesn't try to be more than that, it does what it does well and it always has done. This - I enjoy in a product.
- ghuntley 10y ago
  Agree. I would happily pay $50 to $100 a year just to keep the twitter experience as-is.
user5994461 10y ago
3800 employees, $2700M spent a year. That's 700k per employee. IT'S FREAKING INSANE! There are only 4 tech companies in the world who ever made more than $700k in revenue per head, in any recent years: SoftBank, Microsoft, Google, Apple http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per-employee-2015-10 http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...
- criddell 10y ago
  I don't understand how Twitter ended up with almost four thousand employees. If I had to guess how many people worked there, I would have guessed at least an order of magnitude less than that. When Facebook acquired Instagram, didn't they have something like 15 employees?
  - VLM 10y ago
    Snekay VLM skill, don't tell anyone... business leaders will pretend internal organization is confidential, so all the twitter.com website reports is 40% of personnel are technical and if you've been around the block a few times, thats a way of saying 60% are in sales. So secret of them like trying to peer into the NSA. Then HR posts 50 bazillion job openings totally dropping the docs on every strategy the company has ... if I know which cities are hiring data center operations employees and what skill set they want, then I can tell you where the data centers roughly are, and in some cases exactly how they operate. So don't tell any business leaders, let them stay in the dark about secrecy, but I can tell you purely as an outsider using their own websites for "about" and "careers" they have about 2000 people in sales, about 200 in engineering support of sales (aka data engineers). About 600 in operations (even 24x7 what is that small army doing?). Several hundred software developers of various requirement sets. A couple hundred deep research R+D types. My numbers are wrong and not in a quantity large enough to matter, at least for investment decisions. In a way your estimate is about right, takes a couple hundred front line people to literally make it roll. Everyone else is trying to sell or support or develop or otherwise glom on. And are more or less disposable in that they aren't needed day to day to make the place roll. Yeah yeah I know, no accounting dept will get noticed after a couple quarterly taxes are missed, but just on a pure "who needs to show up tomorrow or else the doors close forever" that number is only in the hundreds. I've been doing this since the 80s for my own investment purposes and stock trading based on published newspaper job reqs and more recently based on job postings is not legally insider trading. If I were to apply and gather data with or without signing a NDA that would be open and shut example of insider trading, so I never invest in companies I apply to work at, just to keep things perfectly clean. I do extensively research jobs I apply to, and that sometimes freaks people out when I walk in and have insider level knowledge of their operations just from reading the last couple years of employment ads. Gotta keep the power level masked when its unnecessary. "wait wait wait, how could you know we're secretly opening a new engineering center in XYZ when we haven't even told our current employees they're all getting downsized?" "Well you put an ad in the paper to hire them in XYZ so what do you think I should assume, not my problem if your employees don't read the papers." I was originally inspired by blackhat social engineering stuff from decades ago.. if they're trying to hide the make and model of the minicomputer you're dialing into, don't spend days trying everything when you can just read off the info from the employment ad for the "rsts 10.0 sysadmin" in the newspaper a year ago or whatever.
wh0rth 10y ago
Cuts could mean a different direction which would be good for many peoples' stock portfolios. Time will tell I'm sure but I'm hopeful.
jswny 10y ago
I've thought long and hard about why I believe Twitter as a service isn't very valuable to me and I thing I've come up with the answer. Twitter is great at delivering live information. If I'm following my favorite artist on twitter then I know immediately when his album drops. However, that one important tweet that matters to me is mixed in with a 100 other tweets of people I follow retweeting or posting irrelevant things. For that reason the situation in which Twitter truly shines for me (instant, up to date information) is overshadowed by the fact that many people also use Twitter to post funny things which I don't care about.
- davidbarker 10y ago
  Have you experimented with turning mobile notifications on for certain accounts? By doing that, I've got a steady stream of tweets from interesting people when I open the app and browse my timeline, but I don't miss tweets from accounts I want to see immediately because their tweets are pushed to my iPhone. The drawback is that you have to get all of that account's tweets pushed to you even if you only care about a few of them.
sixtypoundhound 10y ago
Was pondering this for another business and it seems relevant here. How many people would be required to run "the core" of twitter (basic microblogs)? Seems like that could be very lean...simple UI. A feed. A huge database. For web and apps for the two major mobile O/S. Now go one step out. Running ads on that feed. Core sales team (those with paying accts) and administrative team. Need a revenue source. Add them back. Now....what does everyone else do and is it generating cash? My suspicion is: - First two groups are lean & covered by revenue - Most of the rest of the team is "strategic" yet not revenue generating - The rest is support and will scale up/down with headcount Standalone twitter + ads feels like a business you can make ramen profitable.
cicero 10y ago
I was at a presentation for high school students last week. At the end, the presenter gave out contact information for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. There was no mention of Twitter.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  Cool anecdote, bro
prirun 10y ago
I can always tell when Twitter is in trouble, because I get a security notice from them that there has been suspicious activity on my account, it has been locked, and I need to login with an assigned password. (I never use my Twitter account). Happened after the last quarterly earnings report and also yesterday. In other words, "We need more active users, so please log in soon so we can count you as an active user."
s0me0ne 10y ago
Wonder if Twitter will end up like Delicious. Even with Pocket, Diigo and such, I'm not sure what people use to save bookmaks these days. Delicious went through several hands, Diigo was almost there but their bookmarklet doesnt let you know if you already have something tagged. Delicious abandoned their FF plugin and so its basically not worth using the site anymore. I'll be honest, I wont miss Twitter if it dies out, as I'm not a user. The thing I hate is how Twitter killed RSS for many browsers and users. So if Twitter dies, so be it for causing that to happen.

458 points by bentlegen 10y ago

dbg31415 10y ago

How many people does it really take to run Twitter? If they need more than 100 people I'd be really shocked.

adrenalinelol 10y ago
I'd wager a bit more than that to maintain existing services. But they haven't given up on growth yet, disappointing news doesn't = throw in the towel. If these rumors are true, best of luck to those affected.
- dbg31415 10y ago
  But 3,750? Does anyone think Twitter needs that many people? Scale back to the bare essentials and regroup. Clearly the people there haven't been good for ambitious growth, time to shake it up, find a buyer (which will be easier with less overhead), or close the doors.
  - dingbat 10y ago
    they should focus on being THE platform for key influencers, "thought leaders" and celebrities, mover-and-shaker types, kind of like Yahoo did with Katie Couric!
- notfromhere 10y ago
  Even to grow, does twitter really need 3,800 employees? The site hasn't exactly seen much change in the past few years.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago, complaining about the poor quality in modern software. He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter, and mocks a UI problem he just had. Twitter starts at 7 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA
    - dbg31415 10y ago
      http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png Thanks. Good video.
      - flukus 10y ago
        How do you even grow like that? The current staff during that spike must have spent most of their time interviewing people.
        cpeterso 10y ago
        That spike is misleading because the chart jumps from "Jan '11" to "Dec '13", 23 months. The other columns are all 12 months apart.
        sjnsjn 10y ago
        still, 100+ joining every month, that surely was not an easy task by any means.
smashed 10y ago
And how many people do you need to monetize Twitter?
- revelation 10y ago
  Well, either a lot more or a lot less.
hogrammer 10y ago
They apparently need an army of Social Justice Warriors with gender studies degrees to sit and ban people for "fat shaming" and supporting Trump!
throwaway420 10y ago
It's hard for me to understand how Twitter has so many employees when: a) The site has relatively few major features beyond displaying lots of text in chronological order. b) The site is so overwhelmingly shitty. They had a great thing going for themselves years back when developers were really excited about building on the Twitter API and experimenting with it in all kinds of ways and creating great new apps daily. That stopped when Twitter started running wild and harassing devs and making investment into the Twitter ecosystem practically impossible. They could have kept their costs down and just needed a small number of employees to keep the infrastructure up.
rodgerd 10y ago
> How many people does it really take to run Twitter? Given that the Salesforce buyout fell over because Salesforce didn't want to be associated with the alt-rightists and other assorted neo-Nazis running around the service, apparently more people in their abuse team than they currently have.
- flukus 10y ago
  Their abuse team is going to be their downfall.
- meowface 10y ago
  Do you have a source on that rationale for Salesforce backing out?
  - nl 10y ago
    It's been pretty widely reported. This is a good summary: Twitter's reputation as a haven for trolls was one of the key reasons both Disney and Salesforce declined to make bids for Twitter, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC host Jim Cramer.... the family-friendly animation giant had even hired two investment banks to work out a bid for the service, but eventually decided not to put a deal on the table, fearing that Twitter's sexist, racist, and otherwise unpleasant abusers would sully Disney's image..... Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had expressed concerns about Twitter's problems with user abuse directly to him. "What's happened is, a lot of the bidders are looking at people with lots of followers and seeing the hatred," Cramer said, claiming that Salesforce was "very concerned about this notion." http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13328380/twitter-abuse-disney-salesforce-bids-pulled http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13328380/twitter-abuse-di...
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retrogradeorbit 10y ago
Whats app comes to mind as a comparison. Far more complex. A billion customers. 35 engineers.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Nah, WA started as a 1:1 direct messaging service with next to no server storage - so all the backend had to do was to distribute the incoming messages to the recipient ASAP in order to keep storage load low. Twitter's backend is far more complex, you have a 1:n distribution (with n occasionally drifting into the double-digit million counts, like President Obama), and all the messages have to be archived and live searchable.
  - ryhamz 10y ago
    Agreed. The keys to making whatsapp work were tuning an XMPP server for and the Erlang VM for performance, which takes a few very smart people, but not a large quantity.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    And targeted ad sales, the complexity of which should not be underestimated.

artursapek 10y ago

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to come crashing down eventually if you don't stop somewhere. Either you do it gracefully or hundreds of folks have to eventually lose their job unexpectedly (very sad). Is the answer simply that earlier VCs put pressure on the executives to keep growing so they can multiply their investment? Personally I dream of making a living establishing a patio11-type software business. Something where I can do a high quality job and own all of the decision-making. The ceiling doesn't have to be very high for one guy to sustain himself, and software is appealing because you can automate away nearly all of the "work".

rogerthis 10y ago
One reason is the rise of other players.
- harryh 10y ago
  This is perhaps the current best response to the question. The idea that twitter can exists as it currently does indefinitely is probably false. It will either grow or die when a competitor better exploits the ecological niche.
nameisu 10y ago
facebook wants new users so it came up with free basics shit.
Naritai 10y ago
Would you buy a stock that is guaranteed to stay flat for the discernible future? No? Then you have your answer. (let's not forget that, thanks to inflation, 'flat' is actually losing money over time.)
- 10y ago

pmiller2 10y ago

I know this is premature, but I can't help but wonder what the effect of Twitter going under would have on the Bay Area tech scene.

idlewords 10y ago
http://www.theonion.com/article/48-hour-internet-outage-plunges-nation-into-produc-779 http://www.theonion.com/article/48-hour-internet-outage-plun...
mmanfrin 10y ago
Twitter employs around 3900 people total, 2300 in San Francisco (numbers are from some random google sources, so may be off by a bit/time). In the first quarter, Yahoo laid off 3,135 people in the Bay Area. Twitter going under would be newsworthy, but I don't think make too much of a splash in the job market -- at least not any more than the normal tides.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  Maybe the loss of Twitter as a platform for social media self-promotion would be more significant than the direct effects of 2300 people suddenly on the job market?
  - niftich 10y ago
    Conversely, other platforms have already come along that target some of Twitter's use-cases and offered better UX and user engagement. I'm sure they, or a new player, could fill the void (successfully). This is also less of a problem today (as opposed to years ago) when everyone with a meaningful social presence cross-posts or maintains a split presence on multiple platforms.
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Is this true? At least within the niche of security and crypto academia, I find Twitter to be a very useful tool.

madengr 10y ago

You'd think they would have figured out targeted ads by now. If I follow people who post about RF/Microwave, antennas, SDR, and ham radio, one would think I'd see ads from Keysight and Tektronix, but no, it's garbage like football and pop music. FAIL! I also don't like that I don't see all the tweets from a person. They are pruning the timeline. Good riddance to twitter.

nameisu 10y ago
Is there a third party app which would not show promoted tweets? they are so annoying and un related
- groby_b 10y ago
  IIRC, that'd get the apps API access cut off. But if you want to have fun, keep blocking promoted tweets. After a month or two, things get... "interesting" in terms of what you see. Well, at least entertaining.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - tanocuto 10y ago
    3rd party clients have literally no way to pull promoted tweets, i.e. you'll never see any in a 3rd party client.
  - x5315 10y ago
    Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12789001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12789001 Only one third party app receives Promoted Tweets, and no third party apps are required to display them.
- Overtonwindow 10y ago
  What about repetitive tweets? I stopped following so many publications because they would post an article link, then repeatedly change the title or the catch and post the same link. Very frustrating.

niftich 10y ago

Can we talk about Fabric again? Fabric [1] is a product done by Twitter but heavily de-emphasizes the Twitter association -- it's a value-added Twitter SDK that apps can build into themselves and get crash reporting (ex-Crashlytics) and ad network integration (MoPub) too. In the scheme of Twitter's self-reflection trying to figure out how to cut costs and find what it wants to do, do you feel Fabric fits into it? Do you feel the 'core platform' i.e. the microblogging site fits into it? Should the less strategic one of these be spun out; or should they be less separated? [1] https://get.fabric.io https://get.fabric.io

tootie 10y ago
Fabric is a good product, but all Apple has to do is wave their hands and it's dead. If/when they launch their own product, third-parties fun will be over.
- ng12 10y ago
  Fabric's been supporting Android since very early on. I'm sure they don't want to compete with Apple but it certainly wouldn't kill the platform either.
traskjd 10y ago
Fabric fits in by providing twitter with a boat load of demographic and app usage data. They may still want that data for advertising purposes. Having said that, I'm personally always wary about using an infrastructure piece for free. If my app relies on something, it's pretty important that it not easily go away. I can't count the HN threads of upset developers, frustrated about something being shuttered that was provided free. Disclosure: I'm the co-founder of https://raygun.com https://raygun.com which does mobile crash reporting, and more.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
This is why I don't use Fabric. It's really unfortunate. This great piece of technology doesn't belong to them. I would use it if it was owned by some other company that's more fit for the ownership, such as Google, because I know they have a clear business model and know exactly what they will do with the data they gather. But at this point Twitter has 0 trust among developers. Why would I depend on a piece of technology developed by a company that's struggling to find a way to make money and will probably do whatever is possible to extract value out of its assets? (Which includes spinning it off to oblivion)

throw2016 10y ago

There is value in twitter. Even the people who joke about twitter probably realise there is value in it. There is still nothing that enables one to broadcast information and enable real time conversations better than twitter for companies, governments orgs or celebrities. That twitter cannot extract value from these cash rich and price insensitive entities is a gigantic mystery.

niftich 10y ago
It's risky -- it's hard to compete with 'free', because it takes no money and very little effort. If Twitter charges even just a little for influencers to post, lots of them will just shift more of their announcements to Facebook status updates -- a somewhat similar feature of the other social app everyone already has installed. Despite no one platform offering exact feature+UX parity with Twitter, there are several other free platforms that are good enough for people. If Twitter makes changes that make posting on it harder, its still-organically-growing competitors could see an influx of people who will choose to abandon Twitter.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  I'm used to seeing junk on Fb and constantly ignore it; I don't think Twitter suffers from that.
  - fwn 10y ago
    In both cases, Twitter and Facebook, the content you see is entirely based on who you follow.
LordHumungous 10y ago
Right? I really don't get it. There are entire industries built around producing content that goes viral. Charge Coca Cola $eleventy million for "super tweets" that look like normal tweets. Maybe this is already happening?
dingbat 10y ago
in order to extract value, isnt it first necessary to define that value (of broadcasting info and enabling real time conversations)? that would seem to be a big mystery.

deleted 10y ago

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Overtonwindow 10y ago

Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is how does Twitter make money? I mean real money. Not valuation of eyeballs, not VC cash, but honest to God profit? It has always baffled me and I wish I knew what the unicorns say to the VC's when (hopefully) someone asks this question.

niftich 10y ago
Selling display ads (ie. the same way Facebook and Google have done and succeeded)
- shard972 10y ago
  Didn't twitter say years ago they had a business model plan that didn't revolve around advertising?
ryanSrich 10y ago
Ads. Pretty incredible right?
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
Someone else mentioned targeted display ads already, but Twitter also licenses their full data set to Google (and others) previously for millions. 1 - http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/05/googles-slippery-slope-if-search-giant-pays-twitter-for-content-should-it-pay-all-publishers/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/05/googles-slippery-slope-if-...
eldavido 10y ago
Read their SEC filings: https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-13646&CIK=1418091 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645... If you've never read one of these, you might be surprised how much is disclosed, and in great detail to boot.
saretired 10y ago
They have revenue from advertising and from selling access to their data; what they don't have is profits. Twitter raised about $1.8 billion in convertible notes in 2014. The proceeds have helped them plug the revenue shortfall, however, the bonds mature in 2019 and 2021, and since the share conversion price is around $77, the bondholders will be looking for cash instead unless Twitter's stock price increases 4-fold from its current price. The overhang of these bonds is something I have not seen mentioned in comments about Twitter here; it has likely been a large factor for potential purchasers and it will be an increasing worry for the company and its shareholders unless the company manages to become solidly profitable.

rch 10y ago

My sense is that while Twitter has been able to hire some very talented engineers (incl. but not limited to those I know personally), the high-level technical leadership hasn't been particularly successful. Is there room for an independent 'moonshot' team reporting directly to the board?

booleanbetrayal 10y ago

I have a market need of being able to broadcast messages megaphone-style to the internet, but they have to be artificially constrained to ..

mrcsparker 10y ago

I wonder why Twitter doesn't do consulting. They have developed a lot of the big data frameworks that we use today and understand how to scale. They have the talent and are in a unique position of being Twitter.

Rapzid 10y ago
Just out of curiosity, which ones have they developed?
- niftich 10y ago
  Some software that Twitter has put out: [1] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron https://github.com/twitter/heron [2] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [3] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [4] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard https://github.com/twitter/gizzard [5] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache https://github.com/twitter/twemcache [6] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy
  - moderation 10y ago
    [7] Mesos, abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively. - http://mesos.apache.org/ http://mesos.apache.org/ Mesos was invented at UC Berkeley but developed and battle tested at Twitter.
  - brooklyndude 10y ago
    Bootstrap too.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago

butner 10y ago

Why the 4a PDT earning call? Ahead of opening of (TYO) Tokyo stock exchange Friday am which trades Softbank?

JamesMcMinn 10y ago
Their explanation, I believe, was that their planned time would have overlapped with several other calls, so analysis requested that they moved it. https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=995072 https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=...

josep2 10y ago

Twitter is by far the #1 service I use everyday. It's been the most valuable to me from a networking perspective where I've made friends and professional connections. I also happen to be a shareholder. It's been disappointing to watch Twitter try to become a business and completely falling flat. The acquisition of Vine and Periscope haven't led to much and the user growth from Live video is still t be seen. The product is immensely complicated compared to something like Instagram or Snapchat. It manages to be everything and nothing at the same time. I've been a fan of Jack Dorsey's work at Square but monetization is a complete different animal in that industry. To summarize I just don't know what the future of Twitter as a business will hold but I guess I'm here for the ride.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Twitter needs to find a frictionless way to get paid by their regular users that most users won't notice or think much about. Several potentials exist: can charge to follow additional users above a certain threshold; can charge to expand publishing platform (i.e., to be followed by more than a certain quantity of users); can have "premium channel"-style users that only paid members can follow (this may also be a way to allow publishers to monetize; set your feed "paid follower only" and split the revenue with Twitter), and so forth. The FREE! model only works out when you can sell your users' attention. Twitter has proven that it can't do that -- for whatever reason, user attention on Twitter is not worth what it's worth on Facebook or Google and they can't make a profit from it. So they need another way to monetize, and IMO that should be the tried and true "make people pay for what they use".
- bad_user 10y ago
  Paying in order to increase the maximum count of followers sounds really bad, given that those are the users that also generate content and hence the reason for why you also have lurkers with under 100 followers that just consume content. Your proposal is a terrible idea, because Twitter should be paying those that genuinely attract an audience, not vice versa, since those people can always switch. Popular people will be popular anywhere. E.g. Linus Tolvards has a big and active audience on Google+, even though it is in general a ghost town.

Raed667 10y ago

Twitter should be bought by a non-profit and get re-opened to 3rd party tools like it used to be. I hate the current Twitter, but can't neglect the benefits it has for the entire world (and not only twitter users)

xenadu02 10y ago

I still maintain that screwing over client developers had something to do with it. At the very least it didn't help them "control the twitter experience". Every time I see one of their new ads about how much Twitter loves developers I laugh out loud. There is zero chance I'll ever integrate Twitter into anything I do, period. I'll fight against it anywhere I work and encourage all my peers to do the same. Did everyone forget they didn't even invent the word "Tweet"? Nor did they write their mobile clients. They had no idea what they were doing and stumbled into success. Then the MBAs turned around and stabbed us in the back. Twitter can fuck right off.

nestlequ1k 10y ago
I feel the same way. I stopped using Twitter after that betrayal and never bothered to come back to it. Don't know if it made the difference to hurting their business, but I feel they missed out on something big by losing developer mindshare.
- kbart 10y ago
  What "betrayal" are you talking about? I've never used Twitter, so my knowledge lacks a little.
  - xyzzy4 10y ago
    IIRC, they changed their policies and APIs to being much more restrictive against 3rd party apps. Something to do with rate limits maybe.
  - teej 10y ago
    After years of being increasingly hostile to 3rd party developers, Twitter finally decided that you needed their permission to have more than 100k users of your twitter client. That announcement was bundled with tightened rate limiting and stricter controls over how you could display tweets. This was the final stake in the coffin for many Twitter clients. https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-of-the-twitter-api https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-in-version-11-o...

chinese_dan 10y ago

Twitter lost the trust of many users and are now suffering the consequences. It was once supposed to be the place for the freedom of speech and truth and is now just another arm of the left-leaning politicians in the US. So many conservative/libertarian political figures and personalities have been permanently banned from Twitter in the last year for only posting an opinion that it can no longer be chalked up to circumstance. Good riddance.

gjolund 10y ago
Thats what happens when some of your biggest investors live in Saudi Arabia.
Retra 10y ago
Why was it supposed to be a place for freedom and truth?
efdee 10y ago
I would be interested in seeing a list of political figures and personalities that got banned and the reason for their ban.

santaclaus 10y ago

app.net should have waited three years to pivot into a Twitter competitor...

nikcub 10y ago

No offense to the people I know working at Twitter, but these cuts aren't deep enough to stem the losses. While Twitter revenue grew $664M, $1,403M to $2,218M over the past three years, it is going to be a lot flatter than that at the end of this year - and despite that growth they've consistently been losing about $500M p.a ($645M, $577M and $521M respectively) 3,800 people work there - and equivalent cuts last year can barely be noticed on the financials. The good times are over - they've spent billions over the last few years and not done anything to save them from flat user growth. They really need a wholesale shakeup and doing it over time, like Yahoo did, will just make it worse. edit: here's a more brutal analysis [0][1]: > PS. Twitter staff - I am not exaggerating. Look at the young man on your left and the young woman on your right. Only one of you three will keep your job. [0] part 1 - http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-buyout-rumours.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/some-comment-on... [1] part 2 - http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/measuring-how-bad-twitter-is.html http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/measuring-how-b...

rattray 10y ago
Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per employee. What's all that money for?
- nikcub 10y ago
  Stock options. It starts at the top: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large Being paid $72M p.a to oversee ~$500M p.a in losses. Great job if you can get it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - nikcub 10y ago
    more info from their filing[0]: > During the twelve months ended December 31, 2015 and 2014, we recognized $682.1 million and $631.6 million of expense related to stock-based compensation, respectively. As of December 31, 2015, we had unrecognized stock-based compensation expense of approximately $1.25 billion related to outstanding equity awards [0] see page 47 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-13646&CIK=1418091 https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645...

bluthru 10y ago

Twitter should have a tweet quota and charge people who tweet too much. People who chase hashtags and reply with reaction gifs have turned it into low-brow garbage.

kbart 10y ago
I'm pretty sure tweet count is used as a growth metric somewhere, so it's not gonna happen.
- felipeerias 10y ago
  Same story with bots and "active users".
- bluthru 10y ago
  Too much tweeting caused them to summarize and ignore chronological order, so one would hope they realize that too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

ricksplat 10y ago

I'm just back from a holiday in south east Asia. All the time I was there I was getting ads on twitter targetted to the local market (in the local language) presumably based on my roaming IP. Maybe my grasp is a bit simplistic but isn't this just intensely stupid? My twitter profile is explicitly Western European is twitter's location based advertising really just as dumb as matching IP addresses to regions? If I were an advertiser I wouldn't be too happy about twitter claiming 'impressions' like this.

glandium 10y ago
This is not limited to Twitter. I live in Japan, most ads I see all around the web are in Japanese for Japanese stuff. I went to Germany a couple years ago, and everything was German when I was there. This is even more ridiculous for the unskippable 30s video ads on Youtube.
- detaro 10y ago
  Meanwhile I'm German, live in Germany and for a while got english ads of the style "Welcome in Germany! As an expat, let us sell you some private health insurance!". What a mess.
dvirsky 10y ago
it's a very low percentage of users all in all, doesn't really matter especially if you're charging by clicks and not impressions.

system16 10y ago

Apart from killing their third-party ecosystem, I think Twitter's biggest failure has been their inability to monetize their huge celebrity and brand base, and I wonder if this partly has to do with their "verified account" system. How to charge celebrities/brands without pissing everyone off? Top-tier celebrities and brands can and would easily fork out high fees to use Twitter. But Twitter can't just charge some blanket fee to verified accounts because right now, "verified accounts" are not exclusive enough. They also include "key influencers", bloggers, industry people, other hangers-on (let's call them Group B) and they can't/won't support the high fees and would revolt. Twitter could try and create a new way to categorize celebs/brands, but that would confuse things and may make Group B users feel less elite: so they'd revolt as well.

kriro 10y ago

I feel like a takeover is only a matter of time. If you're Alphabet or Facebook you're probably interested (I'd say Alphabet should be more interested, for Facebook it's probably mostly a blocker play). The question is how long do you let them "rot" to drive down the acquisition price?

gjolund 10y ago

Called it.

sctb 10y ago
This account has posted too many unsubstantive comments after we've asked repeatedly to stop, so we've banned it.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

Says the frog to the scorpion: "Why have you stung me? We will both die." and the scorpion answers "I'm a VC and I will always aim for the 10x exit, this is my nature"

netik 10y ago

The sad thing is that the market will love this and the stock will go up, while many engineers wonder where their job went, and mid-managers/execs will reap a profit.

NietTim 10y ago

Ah, maybe people won't get shadow banned at the same rates anymore now. Just maybe it's a good thing

jamnik 10y ago

Obamas economic growth

krzrak 10y ago

Not cool for Twitter employees to learn about such thing from the press, not officially from their management.

jqueryin 10y ago

One of Twitter's problem is not properly controlling their feed. I never use their mobile or web client. I solely use a highly customized Tweetdeck. With this experience, I never once see an advertisement. That's a huge loss for Twitter. Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't have a problem seeing advertisements in my Tweetdeck feed if it meant they'd remain successful. I'd much rather see Twitter succeed as it's the only platform I use to keep up with thousands of professionals and news sources. It's entirely a different experience than Facebook. I think the Twitter community should suck it up and accept the fact that they get served a couple of advertisements in order to support a news service and contend delivery network unlike any other in existence.

system16 10y ago
What's bizarre is I thought the whole purpose of cutting off/restricting third-party clients was so that they could control what was in the feed i.e., serve advertisements. If they still allow some/limited third-party clients and don't force ads into those feeds, what was the point of burning their bridges with the developer community?
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  What Twitter did was install rate limits on free access to the API. This means that to provide a full-service 3rd party client, the app developer has to pay Twitter to get above the rate limits. So: if your 3rd party app is not showing ads (as most don't), Twitter is still getting some revenue from the app developer. Personally, to me this seems like a reasonable trade off. But a lot of 3rd party app developers could not afford to pay those fees, and so lost their businesses. You can see how that would piss them off. But from Twitter's perspective, they were just freeloaders.

bad_user 10y ago

Came here to say that I love Twitter and am online on it far more than on any other service. I even clicked on its served commercials, because Twitter has my professional network and managed to score some ads that triggered my interest, versus on Facebook where I have a list of friends and acquaintances with which I've got little in common with. Their problem is their ad inventory and their targeting. They should serve more ads and improve their targeting.

mrmondo 10y ago

I don't really have any insightful input into this other than to say, I hope they're cutting the people they most likely don't need. Twitter is the only social platform I actually like and still use, and the only thing that could replace it would be similar but decentralised and as widely adopted. Why / where are they failing - are they failing? I know more people on and using Twitter than ever, many of those have left other aging social networks after finding them irrelevant or too invasive of privacy. Twitter is simple, Twitter is what it is and it doesn't try to be more than that, it does what it does well and it always has done. This - I enjoy in a product.

ghuntley 10y ago
Agree. I would happily pay $50 to $100 a year just to keep the twitter experience as-is.

user5994461 10y ago

3800 employees, $2700M spent a year. That's 700k per employee. IT'S FREAKING INSANE! There are only 4 tech companies in the world who ever made more than $700k in revenue per head, in any recent years: SoftBank, Microsoft, Google, Apple http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per-employee-2015-10 http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...

criddell 10y ago
I don't understand how Twitter ended up with almost four thousand employees. If I had to guess how many people worked there, I would have guessed at least an order of magnitude less than that. When Facebook acquired Instagram, didn't they have something like 15 employees?
- VLM 10y ago
  Snekay VLM skill, don't tell anyone... business leaders will pretend internal organization is confidential, so all the twitter.com website reports is 40% of personnel are technical and if you've been around the block a few times, thats a way of saying 60% are in sales. So secret of them like trying to peer into the NSA. Then HR posts 50 bazillion job openings totally dropping the docs on every strategy the company has ... if I know which cities are hiring data center operations employees and what skill set they want, then I can tell you where the data centers roughly are, and in some cases exactly how they operate. So don't tell any business leaders, let them stay in the dark about secrecy, but I can tell you purely as an outsider using their own websites for "about" and "careers" they have about 2000 people in sales, about 200 in engineering support of sales (aka data engineers). About 600 in operations (even 24x7 what is that small army doing?). Several hundred software developers of various requirement sets. A couple hundred deep research R+D types. My numbers are wrong and not in a quantity large enough to matter, at least for investment decisions. In a way your estimate is about right, takes a couple hundred front line people to literally make it roll. Everyone else is trying to sell or support or develop or otherwise glom on. And are more or less disposable in that they aren't needed day to day to make the place roll. Yeah yeah I know, no accounting dept will get noticed after a couple quarterly taxes are missed, but just on a pure "who needs to show up tomorrow or else the doors close forever" that number is only in the hundreds. I've been doing this since the 80s for my own investment purposes and stock trading based on published newspaper job reqs and more recently based on job postings is not legally insider trading. If I were to apply and gather data with or without signing a NDA that would be open and shut example of insider trading, so I never invest in companies I apply to work at, just to keep things perfectly clean. I do extensively research jobs I apply to, and that sometimes freaks people out when I walk in and have insider level knowledge of their operations just from reading the last couple years of employment ads. Gotta keep the power level masked when its unnecessary. "wait wait wait, how could you know we're secretly opening a new engineering center in XYZ when we haven't even told our current employees they're all getting downsized?" "Well you put an ad in the paper to hire them in XYZ so what do you think I should assume, not my problem if your employees don't read the papers." I was originally inspired by blackhat social engineering stuff from decades ago.. if they're trying to hide the make and model of the minicomputer you're dialing into, don't spend days trying everything when you can just read off the info from the employment ad for the "rsts 10.0 sysadmin" in the newspaper a year ago or whatever.

wh0rth 10y ago

Cuts could mean a different direction which would be good for many peoples' stock portfolios. Time will tell I'm sure but I'm hopeful.

jswny 10y ago

I've thought long and hard about why I believe Twitter as a service isn't very valuable to me and I thing I've come up with the answer. Twitter is great at delivering live information. If I'm following my favorite artist on twitter then I know immediately when his album drops. However, that one important tweet that matters to me is mixed in with a 100 other tweets of people I follow retweeting or posting irrelevant things. For that reason the situation in which Twitter truly shines for me (instant, up to date information) is overshadowed by the fact that many people also use Twitter to post funny things which I don't care about.

davidbarker 10y ago
Have you experimented with turning mobile notifications on for certain accounts? By doing that, I've got a steady stream of tweets from interesting people when I open the app and browse my timeline, but I don't miss tweets from accounts I want to see immediately because their tweets are pushed to my iPhone. The drawback is that you have to get all of that account's tweets pushed to you even if you only care about a few of them.

sixtypoundhound 10y ago

Was pondering this for another business and it seems relevant here. How many people would be required to run "the core" of twitter (basic microblogs)? Seems like that could be very lean...simple UI. A feed. A huge database. For web and apps for the two major mobile O/S. Now go one step out. Running ads on that feed. Core sales team (those with paying accts) and administrative team. Need a revenue source. Add them back. Now....what does everyone else do and is it generating cash? My suspicion is: - First two groups are lean & covered by revenue - Most of the rest of the team is "strategic" yet not revenue generating - The rest is support and will scale up/down with headcount Standalone twitter + ads feels like a business you can make ramen profitable.

cicero 10y ago

I was at a presentation for high school students last week. At the end, the presenter gave out contact information for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. There was no mention of Twitter.

yolesaber 10y ago
Cool anecdote, bro

prirun 10y ago

I can always tell when Twitter is in trouble, because I get a security notice from them that there has been suspicious activity on my account, it has been locked, and I need to login with an assigned password. (I never use my Twitter account). Happened after the last quarterly earnings report and also yesterday. In other words, "We need more active users, so please log in soon so we can count you as an active user."

s0me0ne 10y ago

Wonder if Twitter will end up like Delicious. Even with Pocket, Diigo and such, I'm not sure what people use to save bookmaks these days. Delicious went through several hands, Diigo was almost there but their bookmarklet doesnt let you know if you already have something tagged. Delicious abandoned their FF plugin and so its basically not worth using the site anymore. I'll be honest, I wont miss Twitter if it dies out, as I'm not a user. The thing I hate is how Twitter killed RSS for many browsers and users. So if Twitter dies, so be it for causing that to happen.