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Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates

• rybosworld 5y ago
  I think Twitter is a victim of it's niche. It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
  • thewebcount 5y ago
    Really? I can describe pretty precisely why I hate it. I don't have an account, so when I get a link to Twitter, I see one or more of the following: - A reply to someone else that I can't see, so I now have no context about what I'm looking at. It's like coming in in the middle of a conversation. - A normal tweet followed by a set of replies that appear to be incomplete. There are a bunch of buttons to press to "see more". Often when you click on them there's only a single additional response, not a very long thread, so it's unclear why I had to click to "see more". Other times there are several back-and-forth replies in a row shown, most of them inconsequential. What decides whether I need to click to "see more"? - Bots, crypto scams, misinformation, ads - The entire interface appears to be an overlay over something else. Like it looks like you're reading a popup that you can dismiss to see the actual content. But when you do that, it shows you something unrelated. - Sometimes, but not always, I see the tweet I was intended to see, but instead of seeing replies, there's a bunch of completely unrelated tweets below that where the replies normally are I'm old, so it's probably me, but I just can't parse a Twitter page because it's so bizarrely laid out, and so much of the expected content either isn't shown, or is hidden by default, and so much unexpected content is shown. Call me crazy, but I don't have time to figure it out just to read someone's hot take on the latest trend.
• pl0x 5y ago
  Maybe Meta buys Twitter. The world would be better off with out these two toxic platforms.
• hunterb123 5y ago
  • michaelmcdonald 5y ago
    Sure you can! Michigan has a ban on smoking indoors and business grew for just about every bar and restaurant! Just gotta ban the right people. From what I can tell Twitter is doing that; but their business model is terrible and the platform is clunky. Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people.
    • hunterb123 5y ago
      > Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people. Doesn't seem like that as their competitors that have sprung up are solely from conservatives being banned. Banning smoking !== banning dissenters, your analogy has a false equivalency for multiple reasons, I wouldn't use them for debates if I were you, just teaching. - edit because of post limit - @cheriot: Enough users for you to know about them. Competition starts somewhere. But yes I agree Twitter has a monopoly right now, my point is that monopoly is cracking due to censorship. @ketzo: So you know of their future competitors? That's a start. Maybe Twitter's monopoly will be dethroned one day. Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's a good guess. @ribosometronome: HN and Twitter are two different entities. Twitter is used as the defacto communication medium to interact w/ official government accounts, corporations, etc. It's supposed to be for all. Hacker News is a small news aggregator and discussion community. @shrimp_emoji: har har har JS is bad amirite guys?! @JaimeThompson: guess conservatives are mad for no reason I guess, they are imagining being banned. Maybe if Twitter had open mod logs we'd know for sure, but there's plenty of prominent people that were banned.
      • ribosometronome 5y ago
        Do you think HackerNews would be a friendly place for the type of behavior that has resulted in folk being banned from Twitter?
      • ketzo 5y ago
• sam1r 5y ago
  Has anyone messed with their developer apis recently? Curious if anything has gotten better on that front.
  • bern4444 5y ago
    I think they've gotten a lot better. A whole new version has been released recently. The V2 API https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api
• gnicholas 5y ago
  Is this at all related to Apple's privacy change? The article mentions FB's recent miss, which was attributed to this issue, but doesn't say whether it was at play here as well. I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could generate more revenue. edit: as noted below, this was in the article — I had done a search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
  • vngzs 5y ago
    It's addressed in the article, though absent specific numbers: > The company said the impact from privacy changes by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) remained modest. Last year, Apple began requiring apps to receive permission from iOS users to track their activity on apps and websites owned by other companies. > The Apple changes could impact Twitter in the future as it grows its performance advertising business, Segal said, referring to ads that seek to drive sales or other consumer actions. He said Twitter is working to mitigate future negative impacts from Apple's changes.
• mrweasel 5y ago
  Is there some reason articles like this doesn't include profits? Revenue is specified along with a number of other key metrics, but not profit. The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market likes predictability and will punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future.
  • oh_sigh 5y ago
    Profit isn't very meaningful without a lot of context. A growing business could plow all of their would-be profits back into growing their business, making it look like they are losing money. Or a failing business could cannibalize itself to get a couple quarters of profits at the cost of destroying its long term prospects for success. Revenue is a much more concrete figure that sort of tells its own story, unlike profit.
    • dmitriid 5y ago
      > Revenue is a much more concrete figure that sort of tells its own story, unlike profit. But if you look at a company that is always in the red with no plan to become profitable, the question becomes: - how is this a business? - where is money coming from? - why is money still coming? Twitter seems to be mostly profitable in the past few years.
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      That's is an interesting take, because the company I work for is the exact opposite. Revenue is useless, because you can just create all the revenue you want. Among other things, we resell hardware and software. The basic idea is that customers can get a Dell, or Oracle server and a license for an Oracle database from us, when buying hosting. This saves them the trouble of dealing with multiple suppliers. The hardware and software business is just sort of a side thing, but we can generate crazy amounts of revenue by losing money on hardware. The idea is that we make the money back longterm on hosting. We never use revenue as a meaningful KPI, because we know that some years it will be inflated like crazy by hardware or software sales (which aren't profitable). So I don't really see revenue as useful figure either, not without also knowing if you're profitable.
• rsoto 5y ago
  Twitter has been an absolute mess over the last few years. Through the explore tab, they aggressively promote topics that I have no interest in: k-pop, fashion, reality TV, telenovelas and birthdays. And there's no way to tell them that I don't really care about those topics, you can't even hide them. The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person. And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account. And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
  • floe 5y ago
    > you can't even hide them I changed my trends location to Tokyo on someone's recommendation, and it's been a great workaround. I don't speak Japanese, so it's the same as 'hiding' the trends to my brain. (I think the way to do this is 'Explore' -> gear icon, at least on desktop.)
    • jdrc 5y ago
      Burundi or Anguila are also good choices
    • rsoto 5y ago
      I actually wrote a userscript in order to hide them.
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I loathe how often BrooklynDad_Defiant!, DutyToWarn, OccupyDemocrats, Palmer Report, Gravel Institute, Jeff Tiedrich, and many others always end up being the top tweet of whatever trending topic there happens to be. I refuse to believe this is a coincidence or the result of organic participation. Their appearance is far too consistent, predictable, and durable. Politically motivated trends also start appearing around a paltry 2,000 mentions, which seems absurdly low. But also, in terms of non-politics, I am so tired of seeing "JUST ANNOUNCED".
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  It beggars belief that people don't think the numbers from any of these companies are completely fraudulent. Has anyone been on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
  • aquamarine1 5y ago
    how do we know you're not a bot?
  • xwdv 5y ago
    Aye, Twitter seems to be mostly a social network for bots and people’s scripts to talk to each other. Very few real humans posting original thoughts. Maybe celebrity types use it as an easy way to get a word out, but not the common man. Fascinating.
    • asdff 5y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if most celebrity tweets are just written up in advance by their spokesperson and doled out throughout the week with a script.
      • el-salvador 5y ago
        I think that even political speeches are written in a way that they can easily be twitted.
  • samwillis 5y ago
    While there may be a flood of bots and sock puppet accounts, it’s worth noting that advertisers wouldn’t be spending if they couldn’t see actual conversions from Twitter ads. So there are at least enough real people on there for their advertising business to work.
    • dylan604 5y ago
      That's not necessarily totally true. The advertising world is susceptible to FOMO just as much as other people. Companies authorize their ad agencies to come up with a campaign and agree on an ad spend for that year/campaign. That money gets split up to cover as many markets as possible. If a competitor is spending on Twitter, then you spend on Twitter as well. You can't give the competitor the entire Twitter market.
• arnvald 5y ago
  > Twitter also announced a new $4 billion share repurchase program, which replaces a $2 billion program from 2020. So they're a growth stock, but really they're a dividend stock?
• Victerius 5y ago
  Throwing a subscription wall over reply chains doesn't entice me to create an account.
• conradfr 5y ago
  Like Instagram and others they have gotten quite hostile to visitors without an account. I guess tracking and monetizing your users earns a lot more than displaying ads for everyone.
  • ProAm 5y ago
    > I guess tracking and monetizing your users earns a lot more than displaying ads for everyone. During a gold rush, sell shovels.
  • DixieDev 5y ago
    Yeah, if you click too many links without an account it'll bring up a sign-up pop-up that takes you to the previous page when you close it. You can get around it by opening the link in a new tab, or save yourself constant hassle by disabling cookies on twitter altogether. While we're here, take another pro-tip: Set yourself up with an RSS/Atom reader and "Follow" accounts you are interested in through Nitter. No account, no random "We thought you might like", and no ads, just posts and retweets from the accounts you're interested in.
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      Twitter is also hellbent on associating accounts with phone numbers. This is a dealbreaker for me. I will look into Nitter.
  • ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
    Well with France making it illegal to use Google analytics, I expect many more websites to move forward with forcing you to login. They force you to have an account, which makes you agree to them tracking you, and they'll use you being logged in to track that. When they can use third party analytics it's not as important, but still obviously a plus to them to have people have an account.
    • Vosporos 5y ago
      *making it illegal to use Google Analytics because GA moves identifying data to the US. Tracking with an account doesn't solve this. Let's not be reductive.
• thejohnconway 5y ago
  Maybe there just aren't enough people in the world that want to be a part of something like Twitter. It's an aggressively public platform, which many people understandably don't want. one in twenty people in the world using your platform aught be enough for anybody, but the whole financial system we've set up around these companies is insane.
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    >It's an aggressively public platform You can easily make a private account.
• ynac 5y ago
  I feel so naive / out-of-touch when Twitter comes up. How is it we don't have a simple micro-blogging protocol. Like we do for email. Twitter didn't invent it, neither did Unix for that matter. Twtxt and others are doing some great things, but why don't we move from innovation to standardized protocols to enhance the user experience of the internet. Is it just great marketing driven by profits. As I said, I'm probably just naive, but it sure seems like a trivial protocol to write and then we can all jump on the task of building clients.
  • woodruffw 5y ago
    I believe we do: it's called ActivityPub[1], and it's what Mastodon and others use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
    • djbusby 5y ago
      Surprisingly difficult for Joe Public to get on - how to solve that problem?
      • woodruffw 5y ago
        Mastodon is about as easy to create an account on as Twitter (if not easier; Twitter's human verification process is pretty cumbersome). You can sign up here: https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about (Solving the "critical mass of users" problem is left as an exercise to the user.)
        • FalconSensei 5y ago
          I use Mastodon as well as Twitter. Even though there are things that I love about it, I can't say it's easier to use or has more appeal than Twitter. I think Twitter is easier for the mass public to join. Go to Twitter.com, put username and password, verify phone number. Done! The screens are cleaner and very intuitive. For mastodon, there's more text and messaging about the differences regarding Twitter, what's the Fediverse, instance rules. So you just landed on the main screen and you have to think about choosing an instance with different number of people, different rules. After you are in, you can't search!! You can only search usernames or hashtags, but that is REALLY cumbersome and ineffective since people don't write "This is my #Twilight #book #review #bookreview URL". If you are not tech/privacy focused, the trending tags are usually not interesting, apart from #caturday I guess?. Even after you are able to follow people, you can't quote-retweet (which is a pro AND a con), and even "retweeting" is cumbersome if you are on someone's profile from another instance. Sharing is also more cumbersome since there's no bookmarklet or chrome extension that I could find, and sites don't have a "share on mastodon" link. The solution was to enable a cross-poster, so I just keep posting on Twitter. About instances: on some main instances, speed is ok, but try to follow some pic focused profiles on smaller instances. It can take like 5~10 seconds for an image to load. And now on the iPhone official app, I can't seem to be able to download pictures anymore, and the option to bookmark a post (not like) is not there, only on the web-mobile version.
• johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
  FB deservedly gets a lot of criticism. I personally feel Twitter doesn't get its fair share of blame. IME Twitter is the most toxic social media platform out there. Twitter deserves a fair share of blame for the divisive political culture we live in right now. I hope these companies go bankrupt and it'd be nothing but a blessing for humanity.
  • scarface74 5y ago
    If your FB newsfeed is toxic, it’s because you have toxic friends.
  • zeepzeep 5y ago
    idk, it's pretty civil in my bubble, though obviously there is some drama every now and then like now (Jonathan Scott ^^)
  • bobiny 5y ago
    It’s easy to mute accounts you don’t want to see on Twitter, even ones shown as ads.
    • twitterhell 5y ago
      If you mute the account, the conversation still happens. So awesome if you dont like a point of view. Terrible if you're gay, female, muslim, or any other hated minority subgroup that gets stalked and slandered on Twitter. If someone is posting slanderous material on Twitter, and you mute it, it isnt a solution. Even if you block it, it barely helps.
      • bobiny 5y ago
        I don’t understand. If you don’t want to see what someone says, you can mute or block them. What do you mean by conversation still happens?
  • stevofolife 5y ago
    But how can you blame Twitter for the divisive political culture when “we” are the ones generating the content? I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture. I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.
• j4yav 5y ago
  I actually still get a pretty decent experience out of Twitter. The only topic I really engage with is remote work.. I don’t follow very many people (only humans who post real content) and unfollow anyone who goes “off topic”. Which is too bad, but it keeps my feed simple and sane. I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
  • skinkestek 5y ago
    > I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to. All services would be better if they were more like Google+ (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)
    • robryan 5y ago
      I suspect that the complexity tradeoff isn't worth it for them. As in it would solve the problem but probably send overall engagement down. Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their local sports.
  • jabroni_salad 5y ago
    That's kind of the rub with twitter, it puts individuals front and center... and individuals presumably have more than one interest that they might want to talk about. I mainly use twitter to surface fanart and some communities are very organized with using the right #tags, and when I check those tags I have a 100% hit rate on finding something new that I want to see. But anything else on that site is a crapshoot. It's kind of twitter's normal culture to be disorganized, but I'm pretty sure I and everyone I interact with on twitter are actually tumblr refugees and we're very diligent with tagging. You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use social media.
• joseloyaio 5y ago
  Twitter it's actually on a better path for generating revenue nowadays: - Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse - Audio ads could be next - The crypto integration they've done is just the tip of the iceberg
• YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  The funny thing about all these articles about missed growth is that all the mission statements are just arbitrary numbers. Spotify, Twitter, Facebook none of them said anything about building something new or trying to be the best at something, nope. "Our Mission is XXX with YYY growth trajectory."
• hitpointdrew 5y ago
  Shocker, a cesspool political platform that is banning users every day isn't growing....you don't say.
• arthurz 5y ago
  It seems that every popular Social Media platform became an extension of the liberal governments. I trust a proper sentiment analysis would reveal this.
  • kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Why not do that sentiment analysis?
• powera 5y ago
  The Hacker News zeitgeist appears to be strongly anti-Twitter. I'm not entirely sure why. As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook. As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything substantial in the complaints here.
  • rvz 5y ago
    > As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook. Twitter looks under-priced if you count its recent acquisitions from Quill, Sphere, Revue and it's intention to focus on the so-called 'web3'. Lots of ways to grow in those areas if they are smart enough.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• RspecMAuthortah 5y ago
  Live by the wokism, die by the wokism. Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I quit twitter around that time.
• lbriner 5y ago
  I think there used to be an adage that if you can get enough members, you can monetize it. Twitter haven't exactly made no money but I can't imagine that there is any real trick here other than adverts - the same as most other "free" services. Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for micro-blogging.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  Well, if they let me sign up without a phone number...
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Maybe they shouldn't have banned that user, after all.
  • zeruch 5y ago
    Nah, they should have...and sooner.
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      As an American, it feels strange to me that the CEO of Twitter has control over how The President is able to communicate.
      • zeruch 5y ago
        ...as an American, I find it strange to see a POTUS feel like the laws have no bearing on him (I am not a fan of ever expanding and oblique "executive privilege"), especially to be given exemptions for behaviors not otherwise allowed by a private entity.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The CEO of Twitter has control over how the President is able to communicate on Twitter. As an American, this makes sense because Twitter is private property.
        • BitwiseFool 5y ago
          It's one of those things where in theory and in the rule of law the CEO can do so. It does make me feel uncomfortable, though. As time goes on I am less and less supportive of the notion that private companies can do as they please on the basis that they are private companies. I don't know what 'the solution' is, but I do sense a precedent being established that I am weary of. Twitter is simultaneously a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users, but also a private platform where they can be ejected at-will.
• cronix 5y ago
  So I never created a Twitter account. Over the years, there are a few people that I liked to read their thoughts on Twitter, so I'd manually go to their wall and read occasionally. They're all verified. Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked. So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue. As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign in. And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0 ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and have nothing but disdain for that company. I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    > The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. Thus triggering the headline "missed user growth estimates".
  • stronglikedan 5y ago
    > I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. Instagram pulled that same crap a couple of years back, and I haven't visited since.
  • programmarchy 5y ago
    Yep, same here. It’s infuriating. I’ve been using nitter to get around the modal, but who knows how long that will continue working.
• zeruch 5y ago
  It's almost like Dorsey knew "when to get out"...
  • fullshark 5y ago
    Or he was forced out
    • zeruch 5y ago
      He had been under pressure for quite some time and held off for ages. I suspect he saw down the horizon and got out while the getting was at least good-ish.
• boplicity 5y ago
  I use Twitter occasionally -- but the real shift in the past year is that all of my family (4 siblings, parents, in-laws, etc) have switched to using Signal. A group Signal chat is a wonderful social media platform, without any advertisements, algorithms, or similar nonsense. Just updates and thoughts from people I care about. It gives me hope that the destructive social media platforms like Twitter and FB will eventually be small compared to actually private communication channels like Signal.
  • nicbou 5y ago
    This is something I learned to love with Snapchat. Instead of public posts, people just send stuff to you or the group. It's private, personal, and as you say, ad-free.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Snapchat is all ads for me. I have no idea what any of the buttons do except there is a 50% chance of seeing an ad with women in bikinis.
    • inetknght 5y ago
      > This is something I learned to love with Snapchat. It's private, personal, and as you say, ad-free. It's not private if it's viewable by Snapchat. You can have personal on any platform. And Snapchat is one of the most advertisement-laden platforms ever.
      • nicbou 5y ago
        I meant strictly in terms of user experience. That was years ago though, and back then there were no ads.
  • tinyhouse 5y ago
    First, billions of people have been using WhatsApp for years for 1:1 and small group communication. It's much bigger than Twitter for years now. Second, it's not the same. On WhatsApp/Signal you primarily communicate with people you know well. On Twitter you primarily consume content or communicate with people you don't know.
• AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Guess Trump needs to come back.
• pumaontheprowl 5y ago
  Are you sure about that Reuters? Twitter's stock is up 5% over the last five days. It seems to me that they met the market's expectation for growth. Not many people buy more of a stock after it underperforms their expectations. This headline is at best misleading -- intended to give the impression that Twitter is performing worse than they are by ignoring the metrics in which they are excelling -- or potentially even just outright wrong.
  • ziggus 5y ago
    Remember, this is Wall Street you're talking about, so both things can be true: Twitter can miss analyst's expectations, and the stock can go up because other analysts see an opportunity based on different expectations. If you're expecting much of what Wall Street (or journalists covering the markets) does to make sense, you're going to have a bad time.
  • curiousllama 5y ago
    Estimates are analyst estimates, not market expectation. The market can (and often does) expect a company to miss estimates. If they missed by less than expected, the stock usually goes up.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  If you look at the graph of the share price since IPO it doesn't exactly look as though Twitter is suddenly doing badly.
  • madballster 5y ago
    It's only once you compare the performance of Twitter to other tech shares and realize the last 12 years were the biggest tech bull market in history. And Twitter shows zero return.
    • oh_sigh 5y ago
      To put it in perspective, if you invested $10k in TWTR in 2013, I invested $10k in GOOG, and Mary invested $10k in AMZN - you'd have $9k, I'd have $55k, and Mary would have $90k
      • dragontamer 5y ago
        Those ratios are too close to Jesus's "Parable of the Talents". (A "Talent" was a huge sum of silver in the Biblical / Roman days). One investor brought back 10 Talents, another brought back 5, and one brought back 1. Probably just a coincidence to to round numbers and such, but it amuses me.
        • visarga 5y ago
          > Probably just a coincidence to to round numbers and such, but it amuses me. Or is it? Maybe Jesus knew how Twitter would turn out in 2022. /s
    • marcusverus 5y ago
      It's not just tech--the entire market has been on fire since the Twitter IPO. The S&P has risen 150%.
    • azinman2 5y ago
      Doesn't help their user base largely stopped growing in 2015 while their competitors are in the billions.
• 1024core 5y ago
  Jack saw this coming and hightailed it outta there as fast as he could!
• rlewkov 5y ago
  Buy more, it's on sale
  • yumraj 5y ago
    Like a gallon of milk nearing its sell by date?
  • brokencode 5y ago
    That’s what people say when a normally healthy and growing company has a dip. But when a company does nothing but lose value for almost a decade, the phrase is totally inapplicable.
    • rvz 5y ago
      Then we better hope it becomes oversold at $19, since when that happens it becomes a very strong buy signal.
    • rlewkov 5y ago
      Was trying to be a bit glib and sound like a cold calling stock broker "if you liked it at $10 you should love it at $5" :-)
  • hackerlytest 5y ago
    > Buy more, it's on sale Only works when you have money lying around
• TylerE 5y ago
  So, I guess it turns out that buying user engagement isn't really worthwhile if you have no monetization strategy (that doesn't make all those users angry)?
  • Dma54rhs 5y ago
    They have ads but not even nearly is the tech on par with Facebook or Google. Difficult to understand how they are doing so poor when the media and politicians are the ones holding this simple platform on float like a baby.
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      There aren’t many companies with a need to target journalist and politicians for a profit… well there is but Twitter ads are a little to obvious. Twitter has a pretty large userbase, but I think it’s the wrong demographics for consumer ads.
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  They are not making money, are they?
  • 1270018080 5y ago
    They have had positive net income in a handful of quarters in their existence, but not recently.
  • samwillis 5y ago
    Yes they are, they have just announced a $4B stock buyback. They are a “dividend” stock without proper dividends. Not everything needs to be a growth stock. Having said that 10% down in 10 years isn’t great, especially with where the rest of tech has gone in that time.
    • xmprt 5y ago
      If their main way distributing profits to investors is through stock buybacks then that would mean that their stock should have grown right? 10% down without real dividends is terrible.
    • dktp 5y ago
      In what way are they a dividend stock? They don't pay dividends and despite share buyback stock is down since IPO
      • nradov 5y ago
        From an investor standpoint, dividends and stock buybacks are roughly equivalent. Both are ways of returning cash to investors. Buybacks can be more tax efficient for investors using taxable accounts.
        • PKop 5y ago
          I don't think the confusion is around the concept, but the characterization of "them" as an instance of one, given the stock has performed terribly. They are simply in no way that matters a "dividend stock" literally or figuratively. Many are familiar with the concept of buybacks, but Twitter seems to be a "growth" stock that hasn't grown.
• kilroy123 5y ago
  Honestly? It's because their ads are trash. I know lots of marketing people and they all stay away from using them. Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money. Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.
  • adamrezich 5y ago
    when they (and other platforms) started having sponsored posts that, themselves, have a pre-roll ad that plays before the user is granted the privilege of viewing them, it reeked of desperation. years later now this is the norm—crazy.
  • mgh2 5y ago
    Very effective for free influencer marketing or crypto scamming though
  • xmprt 5y ago
    Another big part of it for me is that they make their ads appear almost like tweets so now when I scroll, my brain has learned to tune them out as useless filler. I don't think making them easier to distinguish would be better because I would tune them out even faster but they need to change how they display ads to actually make them effective.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    At least for B2B, LinkedIn (and paid search) is mostly where it's at.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • mateus1 5y ago
    As an advertiser yes. This is definitely part of the answer. Google Ads is an amazing piece of tech with usually great ROI but requires lots of setup. Facebook is easy to use, worse in terms of ROI but it has the amazing feature of optimizing for spending 100% of your budget all the time. Twitter and LinkedIn don't do either.
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  I think social media for political shit posting will be the first to splinter. In other words, Twitter will split into multiple smaller Twitters each targeting a specific political group.
  • throwaway4good 5y ago
    Ie. Gettr: https://gettr.com https://gettr.com Really just Twitter but for right-wing people.
  • marcusverus 5y ago
    I wish Twitter would give Jack Dorsey's idea a chance--just make the censorship optional. If you want Twitter to be the wild west--you've got it! Just disable the little 'safe-space' toggle and anything goes. You'll have to mentally filter out the fake news, racism, and [foo]-phobia. If you want Twitter to be a safe space--you've got it! Just enable that 'safe-space' toggle, and Big Brother Jack will make all the nasty people go away.
    • throwaway4good 5y ago
      Yes. I think he understood that censorship beyond what is strictly required by law would be the end of Twitter as an omnibus-platform, and thus the end of Twitter. In the same way that we have newspapers split by political observation, we will end up with social media split. In a way it is natural.
• asdswe 5y ago
  I don't understand why anyone would read Twitter regularly. The short limit in messages makes any intelligent discussion difficult, so nearly all tweets are either links elsewhere or nonsense. Either way, Twitter is by far the easiest of all social media giants to avoid.
• donio 5y ago
  Twitter is up by over 150% since 2016. Both are pretty useless statements without context.
  • IncRnd 5y ago
    The context is the original IPO share price of Twitter in 2013.
  • knorker 5y ago
    The context of "since IPO" for a company that's been public for almost a decade, in the tech business. In fact, what other tech stock valued at double digit billions has had such a flat valuation for its whole lifetime, yet still survived? Yes, a range of ~14-77, but it's neither taken off nor crashed. Look at any other survivor and they'll be shaped more like Oracle, Cisco, FB&NFLX (well, recent troubles aside) Look at them all over the last 9 years. Twitter stands out to me. I dunno, maybe there are many big tech companies following the same pattern. But none of them are this high profile, so Twitter is the odd one out.
    • tinyhouse 5y ago
      Look at AMD before and after the new CEO...
  • ARandomerDude 5y ago
    It's been pretty much a straight line downward trend for 10 years. There's probably not a whole lot that is redeemable by more context.
• ProfessorLayton 5y ago
  As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing all this time. Their product has been incredibly stagnant for years save for the occasional feature here and there and some styling. They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out haphazardly, and they totally botched Vine and let TikTok takeover. Despite all these issues, I like it, but it's increasingly frustrating to use, and can't help but question what's going on inside the company. Related: Here's how to hide all the crap they've been adding to the timeline twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"] twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"] twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"] twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"] twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"] twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"] twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
  • meerita 5y ago
    What killed me it was Twitter killing developers apis: no more interesting apps than theirs. It sucks big time. They're also screwing the chronology, sometimes you get the latest tweets (most interesting) and sometimes they switch you to Recommended, which, normally, it sucks. Let me browse chronologically as it was in the old days.
    • atorodius 5y ago
      I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e., it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)
      • mschuster91 5y ago
        Facebook actually had APIs which got closed down after a couple of data-mining scandals (first these "quiz" apps and games, then Cambridge Analytica as the final nail in the coffin), and their messenger used to support federation via XMPP. IIRC that got shut down because of spam and scams.
• champagnois 5y ago
  Twitters design makes it kind of a weird one way communication tool. Elon Musk can tweet something and a million people will reply. What percentage if those replies are bots, shills, or people trying to get money out of some offer of employment? Likely an absurdly high %. Then there are the hacker groups and their influence campaigns... All over twitter. I feel like twitter might be useful on a self hosted intranet with your close family and friends -- but as a global product it is grotesque.
  • zack-m 5y ago
    I’ve always thought of it as that. More generally, idea could be applied to YouTube, podcasting, etc. One person has ability to broadcast to millions, while the millions can’t broadcast back equally.
• cheriot 5y ago
  I wonder if Jack's new company will see a similar stagnation. Square is getting beat by Clover while the CEO is focused on blockchain.
  • zht 5y ago
    in what way is square being beat by clover? was square in some way doing better than cover at one point and is no longer doing so?
    • cheriot 5y ago
      That's my understanding, yes. Square was first but now Clover is signing up more merchants.
  • murat124 5y ago
    Not related to said beating but I opened https://www.clover.com https://www.clover.com and umatrix icon showed the number 258. This many requests to 3rd party resources at start usually mean there is too much tracking. A good reason to just close the tab. By the way, Square had only 2.
  • qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
    The nail in the coffin you are looking for … https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/apple-unveils-contactless-payments-via-tap-to-pay-on-iphone/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/apple-unveils-contact...
  • Androider 5y ago
    Apple and Stripe are also set to commoditize the small business Point of Sale that is Square's bread and butter. iPhones were just announced to soon accept contactless payments directly, and probably also the next iPad will include the required NFC hardware.
    • cheriot 5y ago
      The hardware is less important than the merchant account. The risk of charge backs means a small business accepting a credit card is effectively taking out a loan. Apple isn't going into that part of the value chain (so far).
• spoonjim 5y ago
  Twitter is the best professional networking tool I’ve ever used and should be making the kind of money that LinkedIn is.
• whoisjuan 5y ago
  Honestly, Twitter is just a weird product. On the authoring side, it has a tremendous product-market fit with particular outspoken groups (investors, founders, politicians, journalists, activists, etc) and a terrible product-market fit with everyone else. I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those topics. News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news nowadays is "X person tweeted Y". I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what they have created.
  • kleinsch 5y ago
    Yea, TikTok is playing in a similar place (big creators, lots of passive people) but their algo + video being stickier has led to massive wins. I think it’s late for Twitter, but interesting thought exercise on what could have been if they had the TikTok discovery algo.
  • martinald 5y ago
    Me and my peer group seem to be using Twitter more than anything these days (early 30s) - but not how you'd think. We seem to all browse it to find interesting news/articles and then share them on WhatsApp groups. Having said that we all follow politics pretty closely so maybe we are a bit niche? I actually get a lot of value out of twitter. Way more than I used to do with Facebook, which is just total trash now and my habit of checking it all the time has actually stopped simply because the content was so poor I seem to have inadvertently trained my brain out of expecting a dopamine hit scrolling through it.
• pseingatl 5y ago
  Maybe if they'd stop deplatforming people.
• rsync 5y ago
  After all of these decades ... After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ... I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions looks like this ! What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ? It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
  • mftb 5y ago
    Unfortunately having been through a similar evolution, I feel the same, but when I talk to younger people, they think it's great. I specifically agree with the part about barely-usable garbage. Whenever I'm linked to a Twitter thread it's a dumpster fire. Baffling.
  • demosito666 5y ago
    Yep, every time I'm linked to twitter (I don't have mobile app) I feel myself so old, because for the love of god I can't figure why anyone would use this for communication. Maybe the fact that I don't use it from mobile adds to this.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'd love to see a workgroup to discuss social UX ideas with the goal of implementing a new type of social media experience. Even the FOSS, decentralized and federated implementations of social media are taking their queues from these terrible UX designs.
  • Jcowell 5y ago
    Honestly ? It great. Short consumable content that allows for vertical discussion in two directions with different meanings , per thread discussions that you can skip if you want. If you find it boring you can bail at anytime and if you find it interesting you can bookmark tweets for later consumption. The trending feature allows for multi-community discussion, jokes, and memes. Twitter encompasses engaging text-based human interaction perfectly.
  • anthk 5y ago
    Twitter is best used thru Bitlbee and an IRC client.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dgellow 5y ago
  I don’t understand why platforms like Twitter don’t make money the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a different profile shape (octogonal instead of a circle), or a special banner or label, or any other cosmetics. That has been very successful for multiplayer games since more than a decade, people love to pay to show their cool new cosmetic. Let people pay for cool set of emotes. Or different colors, etc. That doesn’t require ads, is optional, and works well in a social context.
  • dematz 5y ago
    It should be increasingly expensive and time consuming to add more sides to your profile shape, eg pentagon->hexagon is a step up. Adding enough sides to be a circle, or indistinguishable from one on a pixelated screen, would be very prestigious. Of course, this dimension might be disrupted by block...
    • dgellow 5y ago
      You might find it silly but people pay a lot of money to feel they look different from the rest of the crowd. And they are happy doing so.
  • Axsuul 5y ago
    Understandably so because I'm not sure Twitter wants their platform to end up looking like MySpace. Furthermore, these visual customizations are very hard to translate to the plethora of other clients users use to consume Twitter. I think Twitter has massive opportunity though with their power users. Many of them are definitely willing to spend $100+/mo just based on the value they get out of it alone if they can get access to power user analytics, insights, data, or better tools to engage with their audience. Assuming 1% of their users are power users, that's around 3M users with a market opportunity exceeding $3B annually.
    • dgellow 5y ago
      Paid emotes or profile customization does not result in MySpace. It can be done in a subtle way. They actually do something like this with their NFT profile picture (the certified owner has a different profile shape). And is trivial to support in new clients when you’re a tech company with talents Twitter has. Seriously, that has been developed by game companies since a while now, people pay for showing to their friends their cool little golden label. Twitter has the advantage of not being a serious platform, people are there to shitpost, create and follow drama, or other type of crowd interactions. And users already show of their affiliation, how cool and trendy they are using their bio and username. Imagine for example a 1-month “official Marvel fan” banner for $$ at the time of release of a big marvel movie, people would pay for this.
• scotty79 5y ago
  As a person who never understood why twitter existed, let alone what purpose it might serve this information validates my feelings.
  • pcmoney 5y ago
    It exists so you can know what everyone is talking about 5 weeks before they do. Follow the right people and it will change your life.
    • stevenwliao 5y ago
      Any recommendations?
      • pcmoney 5y ago
        I would strongly bias towards people who have built or created something anything even a small thing vs "experts" "academics" "blue checks" (Eg. John Arnold probably knows a lot more about economic fundamentals than most economists) I would bias towards people who have a concrete position they are advocating for and not just talk about what they are against. Critique is cheap and mostly pointless without a real solution. I tend to find the best accounts are ones that you disagree with on some things but not everything. Avoid people who still need herd acceptance to survive. So either niche accounts or people with a social moat/fairly uncancelable, this will get you rawer inputs. DO NOT JUST FOLLOW PEOPLE YOU AGREE WITH. They should either make you think at a deeper level or inspire you. If they just parrot back what you already think then what's the point of reading what they have to say? @evacide @JohnArnoldFndtn @sama @ShellenbergerMD @balajis @dhh @micsolana Also find people who break up the monotony with interesting things: @Rainmaker1973 @Mikeachim @simonsarris Also do not unfollow people just because they believe/do something your tribe says is "unforgivable". When someone asks you to hate a stranger on the internet, just say no.
        • donkeybeer 5y ago
          Explain in your own words what "blue check" means
• stewx 5y ago
  YouTube and TikTok pay people who have popular videos, which gives "creators" an incentive to put a lot of work into what they do. You can argue that the payouts are a pittance for the large number of views those YouTubers get, but in comparison, the only thing Twitter has done to reward its users is provide a virtual tip jar. Not only that, you can't pay to remove ads on Twitter.
  • par 5y ago
    Twitter pays its content creators by giving them an ego boost they can’t get anywhere else.
• qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
  There aren’t enough ex-USA Ad Dollars. Its a modern version of the town crier there isn’t much room to grow in terms of features. So they are trying with ‘clubhouse’ aka Spaces which has been a flop and other superficial UX gimmicks. I think it hit its apex and something or someone will disrupt it so the cycle of businesses continue.
• acegopher 5y ago
  Could platforms like this be better served as non-profits?
  • fnord77 5y ago
    or public utilities
  • riffic 5y ago
    Mastodon, perhaps, would be one non-profit to look at. https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/shdmpq/mastodon_announces_its_first_annual_report_as_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/shdmpq/mastodon_a...
• sremani 5y ago
  I am willing to pay for no noise -- straight dope twitter just like I do for YouTube premium. But, Twitter has to remind of some fucking celebrity, some fucking political meltdown, so cultural gossip bullshit and days outrage. There is no way, I could turn this off this. Along with this, the garbage mumbling of the tweets of people I follow based on popularity (as twitter claims) instead of chronological or some other custom organization, I feel works for me.
• ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
  I see they a huge loss of more than 500 million dollars on a healthy 1.2 billion dollars (which is up 37% from last quarter). What did they spend that money on? Did they invest it in some new stuff or spend it on marketing?
• austincheney 5y ago
  I have never understood Twitter as a product. The idea of following people seems bizarre to me. If I wanted to follow some product or organization I would subscribe to an email, mailer, RSS, or something of the sort specific to the thing I wish to stay informed about. Over sharing, or the idea of broadcasting details about my life to strangers on the internet is also something I completely don't understand.
  • danlugo92 5y ago
    "It's the UX stupid!"
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    Do you understand the concept of being a fan of someone? For example you can follow a bunch of artists to see what they are working on. You can follow your favorite content creators to see what they are working on. You can follow your friends to see what they are up to.
• agentultra 5y ago
  It's the only social I use really but I've been looking into alternatives. Ever since Twitter decided to open up a crypto/web3 team and introduced NFT profile pics I'm out and won't support it... but as the only social I have to keep in touch with other open source contributors and projects I work on/follow it's going to take some time before I totally close my account. That being said, good recommendations are welcome!
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'd suggest as an initial migratory step (or just for having that extra reach) start using a Mastodon server for microblogging. That appears to be where this twitter-like social UX paradigm is headed.
  • digianarchist 5y ago
    I honestly thought this stuff was going to disappear with the change of leadership but it looks like they’ve doubled down. NFT profile pictures? Who wants this?
  • riffic 5y ago
    run a blog and connect with the Indieweb community. Someone else mentioned Mastodon. If you don't want to run your own Mastodon server, but you have a WordPress site, use an ActivityPub plugin to connect with the wider network.
• fnord77 5y ago
  This chart doesn't take into account inflation. Anyway, someone described twitter as a "honeypot for assholes". If your platform is dominated by trolls or other malicious people, I can't see it having a good valuation no matter how many users you have.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• oonerspism 5y ago
  It's a version of the same problem that Facebook has. Once you've had your term of ruling the world, there are only so many directions you can go from there. And by definition, the majority are downwards.
• FalconSensei 5y ago
  They failed to get revenue from ads, just started a paid version that doesn't offer anything attractive for most people (I would be willing to pay a bit for a good experience), and by focusing SO MUCH on engagement without a way to opt-out, they make people hate the tool and their timelines. Tik Tok at least has two tabs: Following and For You. On following I only see content from users I follow. But Twitter refuses to let this happen, and clutter my timeline with things I don't wanna see. And even if I create lists for people I want to see posts from (suggestion from another post from earlier this week), I still can't make my likes not be 'advertised' to everyone that follows me. So basically sometimes I can't even give a like to a tweet if it's risqué for example, because some followers might not like seeing that and then unfollow me.
  • mapme 5y ago
    4.5 billion in ads per year on 200 mil users is a failure? What revenue number would you define as successful?
• ChildOfChaos 5y ago
  User growth? Why does it need user growth? It’s twitter, it’s been around a long time, everyone that wants to use a service like that knows what it is. So much opposition with everything having to be bigger and bigger.
  • FalconSensei 5y ago
    yeah, agree. Unfortunately there's always a too big (IMHO) focus on growth, not only on Twitter but in general, instead of offering a good service that is healthy (in terms of paying the bills and generating revenue). They failed to grow in users, then they try to grow in engagement, but everything they do makes the experience less pleasant
• fumar 5y ago
  Should HN have ads and become a revenue generating part of Y Combinator? Twitter and Reddit fall in a similar camp. Should they take the ad tech approach to sustain themselves?
• alangibson 5y ago
  I'm one of the suckers buying Twitter stock. My theory is that they're the last untapped value in social networking. In order to tap that value, they need to get someone that can run a business in the top spot. Time will tell if they ever find them.
• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  I got a new political debate with three other people on Twitter and at some point they revealed to me that all three of them were the same person. That's what I decided to quit using Twitter.
• xnx 5y ago
  Vine:Tiktok::Myspace:Facebook
• tootahe45 5y ago
  I wonder if they count crypto scammers as real users. Hell , i can't even tweet at Amazon support without multiple automated scambots messaging me.
• 0000011111 5y ago
  They may not make much money but I think they will outlast Facebook - Meta.
• steve76 5y ago
• 988747 5y ago
  I use Twitter regularly, but I do not have an account. I just bookmarked maybe a dozen of my favorite journalists/public figures, and go through their timelines daily. I do not feel the need to participate in the flamewars that arise under their tweets.
• ray__ 5y ago
  I never understood Twitter until I started using it professionally, if you could call it that, as an academic. "Science Twitter" complements traditional academic publishing models really well. When I want updates about science, I read papers that I find from searching, RSS updates, or citations. When I want updates about _how science is done_, I turn to Twitter, where many of my scientific role models are active and almost all of the interesting stuff tends to bubble to the top. Its algorithm seems to work really well for rapid consumption of buzz within a particular network that you can tap into by following people. It is one of the few cases where I like the fact that I occasionally get out-of-network Tweets in my timeline because it usually exposes me to something really interesting posted by someone outside of my direct field. I'd never want to use Twitter for comprehensive reviews of some topic, reliable back-and-forth discussion, etc. but it's just fantastic for gossip and trends. The tables here are even starting to turn–so many people are on Science Twitter that it feels like I find as many new and relevant papers on Twitter as I do in my tailored email notifications and RSS feeds. Twitter is also always a day or two ahead, and the papers usually come with the backstory and context in plain English. I hate to say that the Twitter thread from the paper author is often more informative (at least, per unit of time that it takes to consume) than the content of the paper itself.
• worker_thread 5y ago
  Every 5th tweet on my timeline is a sponsored one! I never seen twitter this aggressive. I was surprised how my brain has on auto-pilot for sometime that it refuses to acknowledge the ads even.
• MarkMc 5y ago
  Twitter is terrible at targeted advertising. I'm actively looking to buy a house in Sydney for a million dollars, yet Twitter shows me general ads that have no interest to me - like investing in gold or installing a virtual chatbot app. Twitter should be working with Domain.com.au to show targeted ads to Domain's active user base.
• Proven 5y ago